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This guide to cold-process soap making for beginners will walk you through the steps and supplies needed to create all-natural soap at home. It includes guidance on ingredients, equipment, recipes, and simple soap recipes from scratch. It also includes frequently asked soapmaking questions and how to make soap step-by-step.
Making handmade soap is one of the most creative and useful skills I can think of. You begin with raw ingredients such as oil, sodium hydroxide, and water, and through the wizardry of natural chemistry, you transform them into gentle, all-natural soap bars. Once you have the basics down, you can make soap using different fragrances, colors, homemade dish soap, and more.
Though there are several ways to make soap, I’d like to introduce you to the wonderful world of cold process. It’s a common and easy method for making natural soap from scratch – even for beginners. The simplest soap recipe needs three ingredients and a few pieces of soapmaking equipment. With that small investment, you could be making beautiful bars of handmade soap in no time!
How Do You Make Homemade Soap?
There are several ways to make soap, and many new to the craft begin with a pre-made soap base called melt-and-pour. It comes in solid blocks, which you chop up and melt in a microwave. After that, add extra ingredients and pour the soap into molds to harden. Melt and pour is the equivalent of ready-meal food since it’s all ready to go! It has its place, especially if you want to make soap with kids. However, it is not real soapmaking, in my opinion. Just as heating a ready meal in the microwave isn’t cooking.
Instead, I make natural soap from scratch using oils, water, lye, and optional ingredients such as essential oils. There are two main methods of making soap: hot process and cold process. You make soap using the hot process method by cooking the ingredients, usually in a crock pot. Cold-process soap is a gentler way of making soap and is the most common way to make soap from scratch.
Making soap using the cold process method is relatively quick and more versatile than hot process soap. It also creates soap that’s beautifully smooth and has an even texture. Making a small batch using this method takes about an hour of active time, including measuring ingredients, gearing up, and making soap. After you’ve made it, you must allow some weeks for the bars to cure before using them. During that time, you don’t have to do anything, though. You can leave them to sit while you make even more batches!
Natural Soap Ingredients
To make simple, unscented cold process soap, you only need three soap ingredients: oils/fats, sodium hydroxide (lye), and water. On their own, they create white to creamy bars that usually smell like nothing other than clean soap. Simple soapmaking is wonderful and inexpensive, but most prefer soap with nice scents and colors. Fortunately, there’s a wide range of extra ingredients to add color, texture, scent, and decoration to soap. There are even soap additives that can improve soap’s function and feel.
These extras include essential oils, clays, milk, honey, herbs, salt, coffee grounds, sugar, and more! We don’t add ingredients to soap “just because” but for a specific reason. Some make soap exfoliating, while some boost bubbles or add natural color. After fourteen years of making soap, I’m still learning about new soap additives and techniques, and I love how they make soapmaking fun and exciting.
Equipment
You’ll need a few key pieces of soapmaking equipment and personal protective gear to make handmade soap. You can find some of it second-hand and reuse some items from your kitchen. At the bare minimum, you’ll need a stainless steel saucepan, a kitchen scale, a stick blender (aka immersion blender), spoons, bowls, a thermometer, soap molds, measuring spoons, goggles, rubber gloves, and a silicone spatula. Those are enough for making small and simple recipes.
For more intricate soap designs, you’ll use hangers, towers, and different types of molds. Then, of course, if you graduate to making larger batches, you’ll need a different set of tools, including heavy-duty immersion blenders and soap cutters.
One piece of equipment that is not optional is a scale that measures ingredients by weight. If you come across a soap recipe that uses volume measurements (cups) for the main ingredients, please don’t make it. Soap recipes are technically chemical formulas, and the oils, lye, and water must be precisely measured by weight to ensure the soap is gentle and skin-safe. Most good soap recipes are measured in grams as the unit since they are a smaller and more precise measurement than ounces.
Easy Soap Recipes
For your first batch of soap, it’s best to work with a small, simple recipe from a trusted source. Don’t try to formulate your own until you understand how to make a good bar of soap. You’ll hear other makers say differently, but trust me. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel when you’re first learning. Soap making for beginners is about learning the process. It’s also about learning about ingredients and making a lot of soap you’ll trust will be good!
Saying that, it’s always a good idea to plug the figures from soap recipes into a soap calculator to check the ingredients and ensure that the recipe is safe. Looking at soap recipes that way is an important part of learning to formulate, and you should use them whenever you try a new recipe. My favorite free calculator is called the SoapCalc, and though the interface isn’t fancy, it’s far easier to work with than any other calculator I’ve come across.
I’d also advise not making large batches until you’ve mastered making small ones. That way, you won’t waste money if things go awry. You could even go as far as to avoid making recipes that include expensive ingredients, such as essential oil or more than five base oils. Stick to easy soap recipes you know will work, make good bars, and won’t be arbitrarily expensive.
How to Make Cold Process Soap
Soapmaking is natural chemistry, and the steps you use cause saponification to occur between oils and lye. This is a chemical reaction where the fatty acids in oils form permanent bonds with lye. It leads to the ingredients transforming into a completely different compound – soap!
You usually begin with multiple types of oil since each type can give a different property to the finished soap. Coconut oil creates lots of bubbles and high cleansing, olive oil creates gentle soap with a creamy lather, and tallow creates hard bars with a fluffy lather. Just a touch of castor oil in soap recipes (5-8% of the base oils) stops the lather and bubbles from collapsing too soon. There are also luxury butters that you can use to make soap, including mango butter, cocoa butter, and shea butter. These are all solid oils that create soap that is hard but highly conditioning.
Cold-process soapmaking is a method to combine oils, lye, water, and additives and kick-start the saponification process. It involves using a high-shear tool to blend the ingredients and prompt the dissolved lye to bond with the oils. You then pour the thickening batter into molds and wait for it to solidify. After that, you cure the soap bars and can use them after four to six weeks. These are the steps that you can expect to follow:
How to Make Soap Step-by-Step
- Prepare your workstation with everything you need. That includes pre-measured ingredients and equipment. Work in a place where you won’t be disturbed and wear safety gear such as long sleeves, an apron, goggles, and gloves.
- Make the lye solution by mixing lye crystals into water and allowing it to cool. Harmful fumes come off the lye solution in its early stages of being mixed. Don’t breathe them in.
- Melt the solid oils completely in a stainless steel pan over low heat. Then, pour the liquid oils in, too.
- When both the pot of oils and the lye solution are about 100°F (38°C), gently pour the lye solution into the oils.
- Using a stick blender held under the liquid’s surface, alternate stirring and pulsing the liquid. When stirring, the stick blender should be off. You want to avoid splattering the mixture or introducing air bubbles at this stage.
- The soap batter will begin to thicken slightly as it emulsifies. Thin trails of soap batter will be visible on the surface if you drizzle a bit off the stick blender. This stage is called trace and is typically when many additives, such as soap colorants and essential oils, are stirred in.
- When all of the ingredients have been added, pour the soap mixture into your preferred soap mold and leave it to harden. My favorite type of mold is silicone molds, but handmade wooden soap molds are great, too.
- If you use a loaf mold, you pop the soap block out one to two days after making it and cut it into individual bars. Soap made in cavity molds pops out in its finished form.
- Cure the bars in a dim but airy place for four to six weeks before using. The finished product will be dry, hard, and lather easily in warm water.
- For more details and photos, see how to make cold-process soap.
Natural Soap Making for Beginners Series
- Introduction to Soapmaking
- Natural Soap Ingredients
- Soapmaking Equipment
- Soapmaking Safety
- Easy Soap Recipes
- How to Make Cold Process Soap
Using Lye to Make Soap
I know that using lye gives some people anxiety, and it can be confusing how it can create a skincare product. However, please rest assured that the soap it creates is gentle and natural and that no lye is left in the bars. In fact, the majority of saponification is complete about forty-eight hours after you pour soap into the molds. Meaning that after that time, there’s almost none left.
At the end of the curing period, all the lye used in the recipe will have become soap. If you’d like more details, I will go over the topic of using lye in soap recipes in another piece. The main takeaway is that we always make natural soap with lye. But that lye is not present in its original form in handmade soap. It bonds with fatty acids in the oils and becomes the chemical compound we call soap!
More FAQs
Over the years, I’ve received a fair few questions from beginner soap makers. Let me share some of the more frequent and useful ones:
- What temperature should you make soap? Generally, you make soap between about 90-120°F (32-49°C). The hotter the temperature, the quicker the ingredients will trace and the more likely the soap will gel. Some soap recipes use cooler temperatures, and some are hotter depending on specific formulas and ingredients, but a good general temperature is 100°F (38°C).
- Do I need to insulate my soap? Insulating the soap batter with a towel after you’ve poured it into molds (or oven processing) is a technique used to encourage gel phase. It is an optional step that helps the color become darker and more vivid but does not affect its cleaning properties.
- Your recipes have less water than others – why? The water amount is variable in soap recipes, and in the cold process, a good amount is about 2x the amount of lye required. This creates a batter that doesn’t firm up too quickly but doesn’t take ages to come to trace. Using less water speeds up trace, and using more slows it down. The water amount is also responsible for encouraging gelling and for problems such as glycerine rivers.
- Can I make cold process recipes using the hot process method? Yes! And vice versa. The only main difference is that you need more water in hot process. Usually, about 3x the amount of lye. That’s because the hot process involves cooking the soap in a crock pot, and water is lost through evaporation.
Natural Soapmaking Course
I hope this has cleared up any questions you might have! Now, if you’re ready to jump in, I offer an online soapmaking course and ebook. The course has lifetime access and includes sixteen videos showing you everything you need to get started soapmaking, including step-by-step recipes. They’ll also teach you more difficult concepts, such as what soap looks like when it comes to “trace.” The ebook is a detailed guide that can supplement the course or be a standalone resource. It includes everything covered in the course, with recipes to use at the end.
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