Making Cold Process Soap
Did you know that many of the products available in the supermarkets that you might think of as “soaps” are actually not technically soaps? Many are synthetic detergents, which doesn’t necessarily mean they are bad, but a soap is specifically made of saponified oils, glycerin and water - the products of reactions between oils and, in the case of solid soap, sodium hydroxide, or in the case of liquid soap, potassium hydroxide.
Soap making is a mixture of craft and chemistry, and fairly advanced chemistry as well, as sodium hydroxide (also called lye or caustic soda) and potassium hydroxide (or lye or caustic potash) are pretty dangerous chemicals! Our soaps are made in a traditional cold process using sodium hydroxide. The name cold process refers to the fact the soap batter itself is not actually cooked, but it’s slightly misleading as it does get pretty hot due to the chemical reactions! The basic steps in making a bar are something like this:
Dissolve lye in water - watch out as this produces a lot of heat and dangerous fumes!!
Melt solid oils - in our salt bars we use coconut oil and in all our other bars we use coconut oil and shea butter, with cocoa butter as well in the chocolate soap bars!
Add the liquid oils to the melted solid oils - in our case olive oil and a small amount of castor oil for bubbliness!
Add the lye water to the oils and blend until they emulsify.
5. Add other ingredients, such as essential oils, spices or clays.
6. Pour the batter into moulds and leave to set! If they’ve gone into a loaf mould like this one, it needs to be cut about 24 hours later.
We hope you liked getting an idea of how our soaps are made, but if you want to have a go yourself, please do a lot more research. Lye and undiluted essential oils are dangerous ingredients and proper safety precautions need to be taken when formulating and making soap!
