How To Make Lye Soap

Today, I'm going to be showing you how to make lye. So, we need two main sets of ingredients and that's our oils and butters, and our lye itself. Now, lye is also known as Sodium Hydroxide and Caustic Soda, and it can be obtained just in the drain cleaning section of your hardware store.

Technically, it's not lye until it's mixed with our water here, and I'm just using regular tap water. Let's look at our oils. Olive oil because it creates a beautiful moisturizing bar of soap.

Palm oil adds some lovely waxy texture and a good feel to your soap. Coconut, coconuts are responsible for creating big bubbles or have a lovely lather on this soap. And my favorite finally, shea butter, which is like pouring a bottle of moisturizing lotion into your soap, really creamy and moisturizing.

But the most important bit, we cannot make our soap without the Sodium Hydroxide and the water - our lye. The water I have here is just water from my tap or you could use bottled water. Water from the tap will make just as good soap.

I'm going to weigh the water because I need 176 grams. Now, 176 grams is exactly the same as 176 moles. But if I'm looking at the scale along the display on the scales, and it's easy for me to be absolutely accurate.

178, a little bit too far. There we are, perfect. The 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's fairly innocuous looking white powder, looks pretty much like salt that you might sprinkle onto your food, but it's not the same.

Going up, 70 grams, and now, very carefully, without breathing the fumes, I'm going to pour my Sodium Hydroxide into the water. Now, technically, at this point, this is now called lye because it is an alkali solution. I stir it around to make sure it's fully dissolved and 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 should you swallow them. So I always recommend that once you've made your lye, you just put it to one side while you work on the oils.

That's getting too hot to touch underneath. Now, it's time to weigh the oils and butters and get them into our saucepan to melt. I'm going to 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. And for this recipe, I need 85 grams of palm oil. We're making about 6 bars of soap here so I need roughly 600 grams in total.

So, 85 into our saucepan, coconut oil, very moisturizing, but I use it because it creates big rich foaming soap - a lovely lather. Okay, we need more coconut oil than we used palm oil, and we are going to be using 128 of coconut oil. 122! Add it to the palm and then finally, the lovely shea butter.

This soap 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. Okay, not quite that much.

Good. Just a small amount of shea butter, pop that into our saucepan. Now, I need our lovely solid oils to melt.

So I'm just going to pop it on to a low heat, just so it'll turn liquid. So, that's all the hard oils melted. So, the coconut, the shea butter and the palm oil all merged into a nice, golden liquid, and I'm going to add 227 grams of olive oil and mix that together.

So, my saucepan now contains melted oils and I need to add a bit of lye solution to it. Now, a very good habit to get into, when I pour the hot lye into the hot oils, there may be some form of reaction in my saucepan. So I always just pour a tiny bit in, and if it doesn't start fizzing up, then I know the temperatures are