How To Make Organic Soap

Today, I am going to be showing you how to make organic soap. The ingredients I have are beautiful selection of oils and butters and I am using olive oil, coconut oil, palm and Shea butter, the organic varieties of these ingredients. I am also going to be using sodium hydroxide and water because you cannot actually make soap without these ingredients.

More about those in a minute. The olive oil adds a lovely miniaturization to my soap, so anyone with itchy dry skin will really benefit from an organic soap made with olive oil. We are also going to be using coconut oil that adds lovely lather to my soap so instantly we have got some bubbles when we wash.

Then, I have got palm oil, the organic variety, which will create a lovely waxy texture for my soap and then my favorite ingredient, Shea butter, which is rather like pouring a bottle of moisturizing lotion into your soap, adds a lovely creamy texture. As I said, we cannot make organic soap without using sodium hydroxide and water. Independently with each other, they are not a dangerous product, but once you mix the water with sodium hydroxide, we create lye which is a little bit caustic, fine to use as long as you know how to handle it properly.

The water I have here is just water from my tap. Although you could use bottled water, water from the tap will make just as good soap. I am going to weight the water because I need 176 grams.

Now, 176 grams is exactly the same as 176 mils. Pretty fun looking at the display on the scale so it is easier for me to be absolutely accurate. 178, a little bit too far.

There we are, perfect. But try 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 am going to weigh it into my little bowl. So, it is fairly innocuous looking white powder, looks pretty much like salts that you might sprinkle onto your food but it's not the same.

Here we are, 70 grams. And now, very carefully, without breathing the fumes, I am going to pour my sodium hydroxide into the water. Now technically at this point, this is now called lye because it is not alkali solution.

Stir around to make sure it is fully dissolved and there are no gritty bits on the bottom. And as I am doing this, the temperature of the water is increasing. It will get very, very hot and it will let of some fumes and they are not very pleasant, should you swallow them, so I always recommend that once you've made your lye, you just put to one side while you work on the oils.

That is getting to hot to touch underneath. Now, it is time to weigh the oils and butters and get them into our sauce pan to melt. I am 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. I am making about 6 bars of soap here so I need roughly 600 grams in total.

So, 85 into our sauce pan. Our coconut oil, very moisturizing, but I use it because it creates big, rich, foamy soap, a lovely lather. Here we need more coconut oil than we use palm oil and we are going to be using 128 of coconut oil.

Add it to the palm and then finally, 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, and we only need to add 30 to make a big difference. Okay, not quite that much.

Just a small bit of Shea butter, pop that into our sauce pans. And now I need our lovely solid oils to melt. So I am just going to pop it on to a low heat just so they turn liquid.

So, that is all the hard oils melted, so the coconut, the Shea butter and the palm oil are all merged into a nice golden liquid, and I'm going to add 227 grams of olive oil and mix that together. So, my sauce, for now, contains melted oils, and