How To Make Your Own Herbal Hair Shampoo

Today I am going to be showing you how to make a herbal shampoo from scratch. The ingredients that you need are: good old tap water. We are going to mix our tap water with our potassium hydroxide, which is a caustic ingredient, so I am just tucking that to one side.

I have also got sunflower oil and caster oil to make sure that we get big bubbles and a lovely hydrating shampoo, and then I am going to be using coconut oil.



First of all, I need to make up my lye solution which is where I mix the potassium hydroxide and the water together. As this is a caustic solution, if I am not careful it may splash me so I am going to wear these night trial gloves, but general household rubber gloves would do just as well, and I am going to protect my eyes by putting on my safety goggles.


To make the lye solution I am just going to tip the potassium hydroxide into the water and give it a stir around to make sure that it is completely dissolved. Now as this dissolves it does let off some fumes and it gets hot, so better to do it in a ventilated room and do not stand over it breathing all the fumes in. I cannot feel any of the little gritty bits in there, so I believe that it is fully dissolved and you may be able steam coming off.

That is very quickly getting very hot so I am just going to tap that to one side, out of the way.



We will get our coconut oil into the saucepan so we can have that melting while the lye is cooling, and I am using 128 grams of coconut. This will give me, roughly, a litre of soap, liquid soap, which we are going to convert into shampoo.

Pop that onto the heat and get it melting.
My coconut oil is a nice soft oil, so that did not take very long to melt. Now I am going to add my two liquid oils; I did not add them to the saucepan earlier because they are already liquid, and, in fact, they will help to cool down the hot coconut oil in there.

Make sure we get every residue of this thick caster oil that wants to cling to the side of the jug; the last residue of the sunflower oil. Now, we are ready to add our lye- so back on with the goggles. My very fist bit of lye that I pour in, I just pour a tiny bit in case there is any reaction.

If the two ingredients are too hot it will start 'fizzing' in there, which is not nice to deal with. There is no 'fizzing', so it is safe for me to add all of the potassium lye, and now I am going to stir it.



What I need to do is to get this to thicken up, thicken up so that I can almost stand a spoon in it.

That could take two or three hours of stirring, so I am going to speed up the process a little by using my handheld blender. It will probably still take me around about twenty minutes to get to the next stage, but let us start that process off.
So, a good half an hour later, I would say, I think this soap paste is at last ready to go on the heat.

I have been stirring it for short bursts over a half an hour. As you can see, it is thick, it is shiny, it is glossy, perfect consistency. Pop that onto the heat, and just get it melting.





So we have now got our lovely thick, grungy paste. All we need to do now is dilute it. I am going to cover it with cold water, but you could quite happily add hot water at this stage, and that needs to go back onto the cooker to soften, because, if we look at it, it is like trying to stir chewing gum into water.

We move the paste around, but we need to soften it so that it dissolves into the water. Make sure that we do not waste any. Lid on, and just over a gentle heat for a couple of hours and then I would leave it for another twelve hours, just sitting in the hot water, or sitting in warm water, so that it softens into soap.

My soap paste has dissolved in my water, so I have taken out three hundred millilitres and popped it in this jug here, and now I can add a few other ingredients to make my liquid soap into a lovely herbal shampoo. I am going to add two other ingredients. One is panthenol, which is a