How To Make Homemade Soap

Hello. Today, I'm going to tell you how to make homemade soap. There are two sets of ingredients you need to make homemade soap.

One is oils and fats, and the other one is caustic soda mixed with water. Let's talk about the oils and fats first of all. Today, I've got olive oil which I think makes a lovely moisturizing balm.

I'm also going to be using coconut oil to give my soap big bubbles, palm oil to give my soap a lovely creamy texture, and my favorite shea butter which adds an extra moisturizing element to our soap. We're going to melt those in a sauce pan. Then, we are going add this ingredient, sodium hydroxide.

It's also known as caustic soda and once it's mixed with water, it's also known as lye. This puts a few people off soap making as it is caustic. But if it's handled properly, it is perfectly safe to use.

As an extra ingredient, I've got some essential oils, some orange oil, to give our soap a lovely smell. Before I start, we need to make up the lye. Now, I'm going to put that to one side to cool while I look after the oils and butters.

Now, because it is a caustic ingredient I'm going to use some safety equipment so that I'm not exposed if there should be any splashes. The water I have here is just water from my tap. While you can use bottled water, water from the tap will work just as well.

I'm going to weigh the water because I need 176 grams. Now, 176 grams is the same as 176 ml, but if I'm looking at the display on the scale, it is easier for me to be accurate. Trying to work out where 176 is using the scale would be very difficult for me and I need to be accurate.

Put that to one side, while I work on the sodium hydroxide. For this recipe, I need 70 grams of sodium hydroxide and I'm going to weigh it into my little bowl. It is a fairly innocuous looking white powder.

It looks pretty much like salt sprinkle onto your food, but it's not the same. Now, very carefully, without breathing the fumes, I'm going to pour it into the water. Now, it is technically lye because it is an alkaline solution.

I stir it around to make sure it fully dissolved and that there are no gritty bits at the bottom. And as I'm doing this, the temperature of the water is increasing. It will get very, very hot and it will let off some fumes and they're not very pleasant if you swallow them.

So, I recommend putting it off to the side. Now, it is time to weigh the oils and butters and get them into our sauce pans to melt. You can add them in any order, but palm oil is going in first.

Palm oil is our ingredient that adds that lovely waxy hardness to our soap. For this recipe, I need 85 grams of palm oil. We're making about six bars of soap, so I need roughly 600 grams in total.

Our coconut oil, very moisturizing, but I use it because it creates big, rich foaming soap. We need more coconut oil than we used palm oil, and we will need 128 of coconut oil. Add it to the palm, and finally, the lovely shea butter.

This butter will be very moisturizing, anyway, but shea butter is like pouring a bottle of moisturizer into your soap. Very, very creamy! Your skin will love it. And we only need to add 30 to make a big difference.

And now I need our lovely solid oils to melt. So I'm just going to pop it onto a slow heat, just so they turn into a liquid. So, that's all the hard oils melted, so the coconut, shea butter, and palm oil have all merged into a nice golden liquid.

Now, I'm going to add 227 grams of olive oil and mix that together. So, my sauce pan now contains melted oils and I need to add lye to it. Now, a very good habit to get into: when I pour the lye into my melted oils, there may be some sort of reaction in the sauce pan, so I always just pour a tiny bit in and if it doesn't start fizzing up, I know the temperatures are about right for me to start to merge to two.

And now, I'm going to stir until we get to the next stage. Do you know oils and water don't really like to sta