Quick Guide on How To Make Soap At Home in 2025
While learning how to make soap might not have been on your bucket list, it should be. You'll be pleasantly surprised by how easily you can make household items like candles, lotions or soap. Rather than running out to the store every time you need a last-minute hosting gift or birthday gift, consider recycling and reusing some things you already have.
Read on to learn the 3 major ingredients you need when learning how to make soap and the process involved in this fairly easy and uncomplicated craft.
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How to Make Soap At Home
Learning how to make soap is not as complicated as you might think, and it’s a fun craft or hobby to pick up. If you already love to maintain your sourdough starter or mix up your own laundry detergent, this is right up your alley. And even if you don’t fall into that category, it’s no advanced chemistry involved here, just a few simple ingredients melted together.
By creating your own soap, you can avoid some potentially harmful chemicals found in commercially made soap. Medical News Today reports about the irritation and possible carcinogenic effects of your favorite scented soap, especially the ones that get really foamy.
Not all soap is bad for you, and learning how to make your own soap is a quick and easy way to take your health into your own hands. Not to mention it makes fun DIY Christmas gifts.
How to Make Soap Chemistry
Most of the ingredients you need to when learning how to make soap are probably already in hour house, with the exception of lye. Lye, also known as sodium-hydroxide, helps to turn the fatty components of your homemade mixture into soap by breaking the chemical bonds.
Solid soaps contain more lye, while liquid soap only contains a small amount. Hand and body soap also uses a bit less lye than, say, a dish or laundry detergent, because a small amount of fat or oil is necessary to not dry out your skin. Some fancy chemical reactions occur when you combine lye with a fat source, sort of like when you bake a birthday cake.
Soap Making Formula
The most basic formula for how to make soap involves water, fat and lye. The amounts and ratios obviously depend on how much soap you want to make and the type. As previously mentioned, more lye equals a stronger soap, but one that can be irritating to your skin. If you want to know how to make soap for your hands and body, you will want to include some moisturizing types of fats or oils, like coconut oil, almond oil, jojoba oil. You can also include some natural scents from essential oils to give your bar or liquid soap a nice aroma.
Note, while lye is perfectly safe when handled correctly, if you feel intimidated and just want to know how to make soap at home the easy way, you can always buy pre-made soap that you just melt and pour. This is great for making soap with kids as a craft.
You can scale the amounts up or down depending on how confident you are while learning how to make soap as well as the amount you want to be left with. Generally, your lye-to-water ratio should be 1:2 or 1:3. For example if you’re using 12 ounces of lye you would want to use at least 24 ounces of water.
What Are the Three Ingredients in Soap?
The base of all soaps is water, lye and some type of fat or oil. You can add additional ingredients for more moisturizing properties, as well as color agents to make it visually appealing along with essential oils or perfumes.
How to Make Soap Step-By-Step
1. Mix Your Lye
This is the trickiest part when it comes to how to make soap at home, but with the right safety measures and some common sense, you have nothing to worry about.
Make sure you’re in a well-ventilated area and that pets are out of the room. After confirming your measurements, add lye to water, not the other way around, in a heat-safe vessel. Stir enough to combine, and note that the water will rise in temperature to around 200 degrees as a result of the chemical reaction.
Note that some fumes will arise as well — avoid breathing them in, and consider wearing eye protection as well as protective gloves.
2. Let it Cool
Your lye mix must cool to below 100 degrees Fahrenheit before you can proceed to make soap. While your mix cools, prepare your soap mold and any fragrances you wish to use. You can line your soap mold with parchment paper, or use a silicon mold from the craft store, as long as you don’t also use it for food.
3. Blend Your Oils
Once you’ve selected the types of fat or oils you wish to use, it’s time to measure them out and melt them if necessary. You can use oils that are liquid or solid, at room temperature. If you choose a solid (like coconut oil) you must melt it before adding it to your lye mix. Melt or heat your oils so they are between 80 and 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
4. Combine Your Mixtures
Putting your hand and eye protection back on, you're ready to add your lye mix to your oil mix. Slowly pour the lye mixture in, noting that it will become cloudy. Have an immersion blender ready, and blend for around five minutes until your mixture begins to thicken a bit.
You want to aim for a consistency similar to runny pudding. Note that when you lift your immersion blender out and let a few drops land on top of the rest of the mixture, it should leave a pattern for a little bit before sinking back in. This is called “trace” and it’s exactly what you want at this stage.
5. Stir in Fragrance
If you’re going to make scented soap, once your mixture has reached the trace stage, it’s time to stir in perfumes or essential oils.
6. Pour Into Mold
After adding any scents, carefully pour your mixture into the mold. Cover it with a lid or plastic wrap and carefully cover it with a towel or blanket to insulate it.
Leave it undisturbed for 24 hours. Don’t rush this process! Note that you can buy specialty molds from the craft store to make cool shapes with your soap. These molds make great gifts for crafters, along with a bar or two of your special homemade soap.
7. Cut and Cure
A silicon mold is probably the easiest because you can simply invert the mold to remove the soap loaf. Other molds might have sides that flip down or you may need to use a spatula or other tool to pry your soap loaf out.
Cutting can be tricky, as you don’t want your soap to crumble. A regular knife will likely cause it to break, sort of like trying to cut a neat line across a hard cheese, like parmesan. Dental floss or guitar strings are popular, or you can buy special soap-cutting tools.
Unfortunately, though your bars have been cut, they still need to cure for about four to six weeks before being used. This is because the water needs to slowly evaporate yielding a firmer and milder soap. This is called cold processing and is the easiest way to make soap for beginners (apart from using melt-and-mold soap kits).
How Do You Make 3-Ingredient Liquid Soap?
If you want to know how to make liquid soap, you only need three ingredients that are slightly different from making a hard bar of soap. You’ll need castile soap, distilled water and essential oils.
Technically, the essential oils are optional so you really only need two ingredients to make liquid soap at home. Pour one cup of distilled water in a container, then mix in one tablespoon of castile soap and around 10-15 drops of essential oil. Shake to combine and you’re ready to go. You can make it a bit stronger by adding more castile soap.
While the idea of learning how to make soap at home might sound a little intimidating or time-consuming, once you get the hang of it you’ll have a blast making DIY gift ideas or taking pride in stocking your home with handmade products. Soap is just the beginning, and if you’re into this type of crafting or homemaking, chances are you’ll love figuring out DIY bath bombs or making a sourdough starter from scratch (if you haven’t already).
For even more fun DIY gifts, check out other experiences happening on Classpop!
