For some time now, the handicraft world has been flooded with a wave of soapmaking – the art of making soap with your own hands, which originated with the ancient Romans. It was used for medicinal purposes rather than hygienic – soap was used to treat skin diseases.
Modern soap has other functions. And in order to make yourself a piece of good smelling soap, you can do this exciting and easy task yourself. You will be sure that your soap is truly natural. You should start with the simplest and most unpretentious recipes to get your hands on them.
There is a lot of information on making handmade soap, so it will not be difficult to read about the qualities of any particular ingredient that you want to add to the soap. For this you will need soap base, dye, base oil, a mold, fragrances, a container for melting and an object for mixing everything.
There are different types of soap bases – liquid, creamy, transparent and matte. Consider the composition of a liquid base: water, derivatives of coconut and vegetable oils, glycerin.
You can choose the base oil according to your preferences: it can be grape or apricot kernel oil, jojoba oil, coconut or cocoa butter, etc.
Dyes are best used natural and food grade. Food dyes give bright colors, while natural ones add usefulness to the soap, for example, coffee, brewed tea or chocolate will give the soap a brown hue, flowers or berries of rose hips or sea buckthorn – orange, spinach or dill greens – green.
You can drop a few drops of essential oil, but you have to be very careful with this – the wrong dose can cause not only a suffocating smell, but also an allergy.
So, let’s proceed. To begin, we melt the base in the microwave oven or in a water bath (the main thing is not to overheat the composition, do not allow heating over 65 degrees), then we add the base oil, a little dye, fragrance, and pour into the mold.
If the form is plastic – pre-coat it with vegetable oil, if silicone – feel free to pour the solution. After pouring, place the mold on an even surface. Did bubbles appear during the pouring process? Don’t worry, splash some alcohol on the soap immediately after pouring. After one or two hours, take the soap out of the mold.
That’s it! It’s ready, you can use it. For long term storage, let the soap stand for a few days, and then wrap it in kitchen paper.