How Soap is Made

While everyone uses soap many different times and ways each day, most of us never stop to think how that soap was made. Soap is actually a cleansing agent made from mixing fats, oils, and alkali. There are four basic methods for making soap; they are melt and pour, cold process, hot process, and re-batching. We will discuss each method in a little more detail.

Melt and pour is probably the simplest way to make soap. It is very easy to do even at home. With this process all you have to do is melt pre-made soap, add a fragrance, pour it into a mold, and let it cool. You can also add a coloring agent if you wish. You can use any sort of mold for making soap; glass or metal baking dishes work really well to make "bars" of soap. It is a good idea to line the dish with foil or plastic wrap to make it easier to remove from the mold.

The cold process is the most common way of making soap from fat or oils and lye. This process allows you to actually make the soap from scratch. You control what goes into it, therefore you can control the quality of the final product. You can't do this with melt and pour soap. When using the cold process of making soap, you simply add the amount of lye needed to the correct amount of water, and stir it together. The water/lye mixture will have to cool, so you should do this first. Heat or melt your oils or fat, and then add the water/lye mixture to them. Stir them until they are completely combined and then add your fragrance, color, and any other extras. Now all that is left to do is pour the soap mixture into a mold, allow it to cool, cut your soap into bars, and remove it from the mold. The soap will then need to cure for four weeks before it is ready to use. The hot process is simply a variation of the cold process in which the soap is actually cooked.

Re-batching is a little bit different. When making soap with this method, you simply grate existing pieces of soap, add enough water to it to turn it into a thin paste, heat it till it liquefies, and re-pour it into molds. Once it is cooled it will already be set very hard. During this process while the soap is liquefied, you can add fragrance oils and dyes to the soap. Soap made with this process does not have to cure as long before you can use it.

Here is a short recipe for making your own soap taken from this site. You will need:

A small plastic dishpan, or Glass baking dish
A glass or enamel 2 quart saucepan
1 12oz can of lye
3 pounds of lard
rubber gloves AND eye protection
water

Refrigerate 3 cups of water overnight so that it is very cold. Pour it into the saucepan, and slowly add the lye. It will get very hot, and will hurt you if it touches your skin - be sure to use your gloves. stir the mixture with a wooden spoon - NEVER USE METAL THE MIXTURE GETS VERY HOT!! Set the water/lye mixture aside to cool and place the lard in the dishpan to warm up to room temperature. After the water/lye mixture has cooled for about an hour, slowly pour it into the pan with the lard. Stir the mixture for at least 15 minutes. Let it sit overnight and then cut it into bars. It will get harder after it has cured for a few days.

This was not copied word for word, but was taken from the above mentioned site, so I want to again give them credit: TheFarm.org