Making soap at home is a very practical hobby. You don’t only have fun but also you make a product by using your creativity to use later on your personal hygiene. It will be a totally new experience for you and learning how to make soap at home is not even that hard.
Soap is actually what we get as a result of a chemical reaction between lye which is an alkali and oil that comes from plants or animals. After these acid and base get mixed with the help of heat, you get the soap. This chemical reaction is called “saponification”. If you want to make bar soap, you need to use sodium hydroxide as the lye we talked about. On the other hand, liquid soaps consist of potassium hydroxide. This is basically how you make soap.
However, working with lye is very dangerous, especially for a beginner. It can seriously burn your skin and even create holes in your clothes. Since lye is one of the major elements of soap-making supplies list, and without it, there is no saponification process and therefore no soap, what should you do as a beginner?
You can still use lye if you follow safety procedures such as wearing eye protection and gloves. Yet, if it sounds extremely dangerous and you don’t want to get hurt for a hobby you are new to, there is a solution called soap base. The soap base is a simple soap bar that you can buy and this soap base is already a combination of oil and lye. So, the only thing you have to do is melt it and decorate it by adding colors or scents. It’s up to your imagination.
To give a proper answer to the question “How do you make your own soap at home?”, you should know soap making methods and soap making supplies list. So, keep on reading the article.
We had previously published an article on candle making. It is a similar process. You can check it out here.