How To Make Your Own Bar Soap In 2023
To make your bar soap, there are several steps you should follow, such as choosing your base, adding fragrance, and picking a mold. Choosing the right soap making supplies can help streamline this process. Here is how to make your own bar soap:
Choosing Your Soap Base
Choose the soap base that will best suit your needs. There are soap bases that offer a deeper cleaning experience or extra moisturizing qualities. Some soap bases include goat milk, foaming bath butter, shea butter, oatmeal, honey, cocoa butter, aloe vera, and more.
Consider the fragrances, botanicals, and seeds you’ll add when choosing a base to compliment the look and feel of your soap.
Soap bases can come in melt-and-pour options. Each soap may have a different temperature it must get to before you can add it to other ingredients and pour it into a mold. Read the directions for melting your soap base to make sure the quality remains the same before and after melting.
Adding Fragrances and Other Ingredients
The next step is to add other ingredients to your soap base. You can add fragrances, oils, botanicals, colors, seeds, etc. Here are a few elements you can add to enhance your own bar of soap:
Fragrance
You can choose from essential oils, fragrance oils, and fragrances to add to your soap. Some essential oils combine smell with skin moisturizers, like almond oil. These fragrances can come in combinations like lavender vanilla, or you can create your own scent. When choosing your fragrance, consider the soap base you chose and how it might affect the smell of the fragrance.
Dried Botanicals
Consider adding dried botanicals to your soap for exfoliation, more fragrance, and enhanced aesthetics. Dried botanicals can include lavender flowers, rose petals, peppermint leaves, and black walnut hulls. Add exfoliating ingredients to your soap by adding chia seeds, milk thistle seeds, or fennel seeds to your soap base.
Soap Colors
Add a soap color bar or mica soap colors to your base. To add more than one color or layer, choose mica soap power. Soap color bars may be best when only using one color. You can also add shimmer to your soap with a melt-and-pour shimmer color block.
Picking Your Soap Mold
There are a variety of different soap molds for you to choose from, like plastic molds and silicon molds. Plastic molds can come in a variety of shapes, styles, and sizes.
These molds can contain designs like animals, flowers, words, etc. Silicon molds can come in shapes like loaves, rectangles, hearts, balls, and the classic oval.
For those who choose to use a loaf or cylinder for their soap, consider also purchasing a cutter to make sure each bar is the same size.
Choose the soap mold that best fits your bar of soap’s purpose. For everyday use bars of soap, consider the classic mold, and a plastic mold with a design for more decorative soaps.
Beginning the Process
After you have chosen all of the soap making supplies above, you can now begin making your own bar of soap. Here are some steps you can take to create your soap:
1. Measuring ingredients: Weigh your soap base and other oils on a digital scale. Heat them gently until they reach the required temperature.
2. Include additives: Now is the time to add your chosen additives, such as essential oils for fragrance and seeds for exfoliation. Mix thoroughly.
3. Molding: Pour the soap into your chosen soap molds. Try pouring slowly to make sure each part of the mold is full with your soap mixture.
4. Curing: Allow the soap to cure in the molds for the recommended amount of time. This should help the soap harden and become easier to take out of the mold.
5. Cutting and unmolding: Once unmolded, you can cut the soap into bars (for loaves and cylinders) and place them in a well-ventilated area to cure. Curing allows excess moisture to evaporate, which can result in a harder, longer-lasting soap. Each soap base curing process can vary in time.
Find Quality Soap Making Supplies
To make your own soap, you can follow these steps, but the steps may vary depending on ingredients, additives, molds, etc. Choose quality supplies to make your own soap making process seamless. Contact a soap making supplies vendor to learn more about how to make your own soap.
