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Homemade Soap Made Simple

Jennifer Stepanik

Dedication

Dedication

You only have one body; pamper it with handmade soaps and you’ll reap the rewards. Create and customise your own soaps and unleash your creativity in the process. Then spread the love and share with family and friends. To find out more about creating your own body care products and staying healthy, log on to http://home-made-beauty-tips.com

Disclaimer:I am not a qualified herbalist or chemist. I do, however, have over 14 years of skin care industry experience and 2 years of naturopathic training. Otherwise I am self-educated on health and homemade body care products and want to share my knowledge.

While the greatest care has been taken to provide accurate information in this eBook, it should not replace your own research. All skin types are different and I, Jennifer Stepanik, cannot be held responsible for any individual reaction.

You should not use soaps on broken or damaged skin. This eBook is not intended to cure, treat or prevent any disease or illness. If you have a persistent skin complaint you should seek professional medical advice.

Lye, one of the key ingredients in soap making, is incredibly caustic and can burn immediately on contact. Extreme care and precautions should be taken when making soap to protect yourself and others around you. You should not leave lye unattended and always store it safely out of reach of children and pets. You should ensure that any implements are used only for soap making.

Homemade Soap Made Simple is intended for information purposes only.

What is soap?

Soap is all about chemical reactions. But don’t worry, we’re not scientists so we are going to break it down into simple terms – soap is the salt which results from mixing an acid with an alkali.

The acid used in soap-making tends to be a fatty acid, the type that you find in food and oils. The alkali was originally sourced from wood ash, but over time has been replaced with the industrially-made compound, sodium hydroxide.

Saponification is the chemical name given to the process of making soap, and essentially means the reaction that happens when the acid (a vegetable oil or animal fat) is mixed with a strong alkali (lye). The by-products of the process are soap and glycerine. Commercial soap makers tend to siphon off this glycerine and sell it for use in personal care products, pharmaceuticals, chemical intermediates, and food processing, but natural soap makers leave it in, which means that homemade soap is much more moisturising.

Soap molecules work by attaching to water on one end and grease on the other, so that when the water washes the soap molecule away, it takes the grease with it.

History of Soap Making

Early Origins

Crude forms of soap, consisting of fats boiled with ashes, have been found in Ancient Babylon excavations from around 2,800 B.C., but the mixture would have been used to clean wool and cotton for textiles, rather than the body.

Just a few hundred years later, in 2,500 B.C., the Sumerians noted on their clay tablets that they used soap to remove grease from wool and cloth before dying, but their original mix was a simple slurry made only of ash and water – the alkali in the ash reacted with the grease (fatty acid) on the wool to create saponification. As long as there was grease and oil to be removed, the slurry worked well, but the Sumerians soon made the connection that a little grease in the mix helped the cleaning solution and they too started to boil fats and oils directly into the alkali mix for a more powerful solution. In 2,200 B.C they even recorded a formula consisting of water, alkali and cassia oil.

Another early example is seen in the Ebers Papyrus, a medical document from circa. 1,550 B.C., which shows that early Egyptians also mixed animal and vegetable oils with alkaline salts to make something similar to soap.

The most familiar reference, however, comes from the Romans – after all, they did invent most modern civilisation as we know it. Their soap included the cleaning power of ammonia from rotting urine and was widely used throughout the Roman Empire – thankfully, still only for clothes, not personal washing! In 600 A.D. soap making guilds were first set up and a few hundred years later the first commercial bars were being sold for a third of a dinar.

With the collapse of the Roman Empire, the soap-making process virtually ground to a halt and was not revived until the thirteenth century throughout Europe. Soap makers in Northern Europe continued to use animal fat and wood ash to create a jelly-like cleaning substance, but given the ingredients and lack of refrigeration, the tallow or animal fat often smelled quite vile.

Worse still, the Brits destroyed large areas of woodland to produce the ash, causing a winter fuel shortage, while soap made with tallow depleted reserves which were needed for candles. As tallow shortages threatened to make the basic commodity of candles too expensive for the poor, the UK government taxed soap as a luxury item and the exorbitant prices charged could only be afforded by the very rich.

Soap making thrived in Southern Europe, on the other hand, and great advancements were made throughout Italy, France and Spain; towns such as Castille and Marseilles became famous for their superior quality soaps. The secret of these Mediterranean countries was to use high grade olive oil instead of animal fat, and barilla ash. This development is known as Castille Soap and created pleasant smelling, naturally moisturising solid bars of soap, which could be shredded or moulded to form wash balls.

At the end of the eighteenth century, French chemists began to understand the soap making process even better and helped make more significant advancements in its manufacture. The industrial revolution in the nineteenth century moved soap production into factories where it blossomed: the economies of scale and UK tax repeals led to reduced prices; the science of soap introduced a softer version for personal use (not laundry); while advances in plumbing made bathing a normal part of life for all classes.

In 1890 five major companies – Colgate, Morse Taylor, Albert, Pears and Bailey – offered different types of soap. During the First World War, the need for cleaning agents to treat battlefield wounds led to the creation of synthetic compounds to make soap, commonly known as detergents. In 1933, the first synthetic household detergent was introduced by Procter and Gamble. P&G also refined a continuous process which decreased production time to one day, making it much more cost effective.

Little has changed in the process of soap-making to modern time, and most cheap soap bars found in supermarkets are actually synthetic detergents. Fortunately there is a revival of traditional soap making processes to produce natural homemade soaps, full of moisturising goodness and free from harmful chemical additives.

What’s in a name?

A couple of sources are credited with calling these early mixes of animal fat and ash “soap”:

Mount Sapo in Rome is widely believed to have lent its name to the cleaning product, as this was where animals were sacrificed; rainwater washed a mixture of melted animal fat and wood ash into the River Tiber, where it was used for washing clothes and skin.

The Latin word “sapo”, meaning “soap”, first appeared in Pliny the Elder’s Historia Naturalis, chronicling life in the first century AD.

However, the Celts are also credited with christening a product made from animal fat and plant ash as “saipo”, from which soap is apparently derived.

The alkali used in soap making became known as “lye” (although curiously this was not because it was short for alkali), and so early colonial soap was often referred to as “lye soap”. Without proper measuring facilities and limited understanding of the process, these early bars were often very caustic and so the term nowadays is pejorative, insinuating a bad soap that would irritate the skin.

Benefits of Making Your Own Soap

There are many benefits of making your own soap:

You know exactly what you are putting on your skin;

You can design your soap’s own look, feel and smell;

You can add any essential oils to suit you;

You get the nourishing benefits of the glycerine by-product;

You will have a great new hobby; and

You can start to make some money from selling your unique handcrafted soaps.

With all these great reasons to make your own soap, let’s find out how to create a homemade slice of luxury.

What Is In Soap?

Essentially, soap is made up of lye, mixed with fats or oils, but you can add other natural ingredients such botanicals, fragrance and colorants to suit your personal preference. We will go through each element in turn and discuss the options available, as well as how to ensure you get the finest quality ingredients to reap maximum benefits from your soap.

Lye

The first ingredient you need to create saponification is an alkali in the form of lye, also known as sodium hydroxide or caustic soda. The chemical is obtained by leaching ashes with water and today is commercially manufactured using a membrane cell chlor-alkali process. Sodium hydroxide is used as a drain cleaner and can also be found in the process of making paper, glass and textiles.

Although a key element in making body soap, be aware that lye is an extremely corrosive substance, best known as caustic soda. It is dangerous to living tissues (i.e. skin, flesh and eyes) and can cause chemical burns, scarring and blindness with immediate contact. Therefore caution must be used at all times when working with this inorganic compound; always wear rubber gloves, cover clothes and skin with a thick outer layer, work in a well-ventilated area and have a supply of vinegar handy to neutralise any spills.

Sodium hydroxide usually forms the base of a hard soap, while potash, also known as potassium hydroxide, is more appropriate for making liquid soaps as it is softer (but no less dangerous) and more easily dissolved in water.

Even though, the use of lye may sound scary to the novice soap maker, lye does in fact evaporate from your bar within 24-48 hours of moulding your soap.

Fats and oils

You can choose from a wide range of oils, and recipes tend to use a mix of

Impressum

Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

Texte: Jennifer Stepanik
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 05.03.2014
ISBN: 978-3-7309-8941-8

Widmung:
You only have one body; pamper it with handmade soaps and you’ll reap the rewards. Create and customise your own soaps and unleash your creativity in the process. Then spread the love and share with family and friends. To find out more about creating your own body care products and staying healthy, log on to http://home-made-beauty-tips.com

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