How To Make Liquid Soap

Today, I'm going to be showing you how to make liquid soap. We have two sets of ingredients that we need to use. One is our selection of oils, butters and fats, and our other is our lye solution which is made of water and potassium hydroxide.

This is actually a caustic ingredient. But as long as you know how to handle and manage it, it is not dangerous at all. The exciting part is choosing your oils and your fats, and I've chosen olive oil because it gives a lovely moisturizing liquid soap, coconut oil, because this creates lots of lather so we get a nice rich bubbly liquid soap, and I've chosen castor oil.

This does both of those things, it's moisturizing and it creates bubbles as well. For our lye solution, the water I'm using is just good old regular tap water. First, I'm going to weigh out the water, and I need 134 grams of water.

I'm going to weigh it, because I can be far more accurate trying to get my 134 grams by weight rather than 134 mils by using the measure at the side. Perfect. So, trying to make out where 134 mils would fall on the scale is very difficult but I know that it weighs 134 grams.

Now, I'm going to measure my potassium hydroxide. For this recipe which is going to make about a litre of liquid soap in total, I need 74 grams of potassium hydroxide and what I need to do next is to dissolve the potassium hydroxide into the water. Now, as this dissolves, it lets of some fumes and heats the water up, so I always do this in a ventilated room and try not to breathe over the top of the jar.

Now, I can feel that it's not crunchy, it's all dissolved. That is my lye solution; I'm just going to put that out of the way somewhere while I weigh out the oils into my saucepan. While my lye is cooling a little, I need to get my oils ready.

I'm just going to put the coconut oil into the saucepan so that it melts. For this recipe, I need 128 grams of coconut oil. Spot on.

The coconut oil is just going to melt on the cooker over here and then I'll have my liquid oils. The coconut oil has melted nicely. So, we just have a saucepan for the liquid coconut oil, and what I need to do now is to add castor oil and the olive oil.

We need 146 grams of olive oil. This will help cool the coconut oil down as well, because the olive oil is cold. And we need 80 grams of our castor oil which is most of the bottle.

Castor oil is much thicker than olive oil. We now have a saucepan full of 3 different oils: coconut, castor and olive. What I need to do now is to add the lye to it.

So I put my gloves back on. My lye has cooled a little and my oils are ready for it. A good habit to get into is to just pour a small amount of lye into my oils first.

If they are too hot, it will fizzle and that's dangerous to be dealing with. This is not too hot; it does not fizzle so I just pour the rest of the lye in. Now, I need to stir this until we reach something called trace which is where the mixture looks rather like custard and is thick.

Depending on the temperature of the room and the oils, I could be stirring for up to two days. I do not want to stir for two days so I'm going to use a hand-held blender to speed the process up. I've whisked that on and off for the last 40 minutes and I'm happy to report that we have a light trace.

It looks very much like custard, a lovely pale yellow colour. Now, as I spill it back into the saucepan, it sits on the surface a bit before sinking in. Now, the next stage is to put it back on the heat, put a lid on and cook it for anything between 1 and 2 hours, stirring it occasionally so that it doesn't stick to the bottom of the saucepan.

We need to get it to the next stage which is called a paste. The soap has behaved very nicely and we've got exactly what I was expecting which is a lovely glossy paste - it looks almost translucent and glossy. It's taken just over an hour and a half.

We are now ready to dilute it. I am going to pour just under a litre of water o