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Soap yourself making tips and easy recipes
The basic substance for soaps are oils and fats. If you want to produce particularly mild variants, vegetable fats are recommended. But animal fats are also suitable. The respective fatty acids such as linoleic acid, palmitic acid, stearic acid or oleic acid decide on the properties of the soap.
contents
- Methods of soap making
- Raw materials for handmade soap
- Saponify
- Nourishing oils
- Make the soap smell
- aromatic plants
- Coloring natural soap
- To compose soaps
- Form
- Skin care teas
- Make natural vegetable oil soap yourself
Methods of soap making
Soaps are the salts contained in the fatty acids. These can be boiled out of the fatty acids with a sodium or potassium lye. The reason for this is that traditionally the soap paste is cooked in a pot. Much gentler and suitable for beginners, however, is the cold process. Here, the lye does not boil, the products are milder, but the process takes longer. The temperatures rise also with this procedure to 85 degrees Celsius. There are four ways to make soap: the core soap process, the cold process, the hot process, and the reflow process.
Soap can be made in-house in a variety of ways. For beginners, the so-called cold process is particularly well suited. (Image: martingaal / fotolia.com) Raw materials for handmade soap
For the production use either vegetable oils and fats like coconut oil, rapeseed, sunflower or olive oil or mix these oils with tallow or lard. If you use palm oil, make sure it's from sustainable sources: palm oil plantations are the # 1 rainforest killer, and palm oil for which primary or secondary forests are felled is the opposite of producing your own soap, which should also be environmentally safe.
The different oils differ in how hard they are, how much foam they form and how stable they are, so that the mixture determines the properties of the final product.
They mix the fats and oils with caustic soda (NaOH). For that it needs tact. The oil needs so much lye that the soap is not too basic, but not too oily. It gets too oily if you use too little lye.
Saponify
They heat the fats and the lye to about 50 to 60 degrees Celsius and mix both with a hand blender. It takes about half an hour.
In fats and oils, fatty acid molecules are attached to the glycerol molecules. By saponifying the fat molecules split, the fatty acid combine with lye, the glycerin remains.
In the case of industrially manufactured products, the glycerol is used for other purposes. The cold process, however, preserves the glycerin, which softens the soap.
Nourishing oils
We add care oils while the mass is saponified, so it gets a consistency of jelly. The first time this is probably wrong, because here you need flair. Add the care oils too early to saponify the base oils. If you come too late, smudged chunks instead of supple soap, it blows bubbles and does not creamy.
Suitable care oils are: jojoba oil, shea butter, wheat germ oil, castor oil, coconut oil or avocado oil.
Rose oil ensures that the handmade soap smells good. (Image: Floydine / fotolia.com) Make the soap smell
You want your soap to smell good? For this you add fragrances. It also has medicinal benefits: smells affect our mood, and we want to smell good when we wash ourselves. However, the finished product hardly smells like the perfume they mix in it. You should refrain from using commercially available perfumes that contain alcohol. The shows itself in the finished product as streaks.
You will not get around experimenting and learning by doing. General quantities, how much of which perfume you should give, are of little help. Fragrance oils such as lavender oil, bergamot oil or rose oil are suitable for beginners. Instead of rose oil, you can also add rose water - which is much cheaper, but also less concentrated.
aromatic plants
If you even want a little exfoliation, you can also put the crushed herbs and plant parts themselves dried into the soap: rosemary, lavender, sage, mint, lemon balm, grated lemon, peach, such as orange peel, ginger powder or dried and grated flowers of Roses, cornflowers, cowslips, hollyhocks, jasmine, lilac, apple, almonds or cherries.
Depending on which fragrance you want to achieve, all plant parts come as a powder or heavily crushed and dried in question, which do not have a toxic effect on the skin and / or trigger allergies in them. With sage, rosemary and other herbs even medicinal properties are added.
You can also apply your own oils, which can be left for a few weeks or months and then used to make the soap, as well as in the kitchen. For rosemary oil, for example, place rosemary sprigs in an oil of your choice, such as rape and sunflowers, thistle oil and olive oil.
It is not so easy with flower scent, because you need large quantities of rose petals, for example, to produce an acceptable fragrance oil. That's the reason for the high price. Try it: Grated dry raspberry and blackberry leaves give the soap a rough texture and a slightly earthy fragrance.
The soap can be dyed at will. It is important that the colors are free from harmful substances and do not rub off. (Image: whitestorm / fotolia.com) Coloring natural soap
You can use all kinds of skin-friendly colors, but they should not stick to the skin. For example, do not use beetroot or blackberry juice. You should not use food colors, but ask at art shops for non-toxic colors that will not penetrate the skin. The natural color of soaps is bright yellowish.
To compose soaps
Do not despair if the result leaves something to be desired the first few times. That's not just normal, it's necessary. Nor will you begin to reach the fragrance you had in mind, as you write down an outstanding story in the first narrative you write.
Mostly we use fragrance oils bought at the beginning. Unfortunately, they are expensive, with the cheap ones for 1 Euro, the fragrance disappears quickly. Good lavender oil costs per vial, for example, around 7 euros. But you also have the certainty that the soap still smells good even after months.
Form
When the oils, colors and perfumes are in bulk, and the soap starts to harden but is still liquid, pour everything into molds. It is suitable porcelain containers as well as plastic or ceramic.
Pre-grease the molds with Vaseline so that the mass can be formed. To avoid bubbles, tap the molds several times on a firm surface.
Skin care teas
Tip: In all recipes you can use herbal teas instead of water, which first of all smell and secondly care for the skin. These include marigold tea, lavender tea, spruce or pine needles.
Pure olive oil soap is particularly mild and therefore well suited for sensitive skin. (Image: sebra / fotolia.com) Make natural vegetable oil soap yourself
A nourishing olive oil soap can be made quickly and easily yourself.
| Recipe for olive oil soap For about 1400 grams of soap you need:
Preparation:
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If you want a pure olive oil soap, that's enough. But you can also add some rosemary, rose or lavender oil, rosemary leaves, crushed and dried lavender flowers, crushed and dried orange peel or other plant substances. One nuance is lavender or mint tea, which they use instead of the water. Even more unusual teas such as ginger tea or linden flower tea are suitable. Or you can make tea from pine needles or use birch water.
For a vegetable oil soap, for example, take 350 ml of olive oil, 250 ml of coconut oil, 300 ml of rapeseed oil and 120 g of NaOH, and 250 ml of water and proceed as with the recipe with pure olive oil.
(Dr. Utz Anhalt)