Liquid Soap

I've seen a few posts on Pinterest about making your own liquid hand soap and I just knew I was going to try that someday. Today was the day.

I have a little box with several bars of nice smelling soap that I have been saving for some special occasion. I guess I still haven't figured out what kind of occasion that may be. I chose a package of soap that was "Verbena" scented and it was from France. Should make good hand soap, right?

There were 5 little bars in the package, each were .88 ounces. Let's just call them 1 ounce bars, so I used a total of 2 ounces of bar soap.

I used a microplaner, but you can use any kind of grater that will shred the soap into tiny pieces. I grated down those 2 little bars and had a mound of soap (which I forgot to take a picture of) that would have been equal to about a cup and a half....or so.

I used a good sized metal pot and put 64 ounces of water into it, 1 Tbsp glycerin (available at any health food or vitamin store in the skin care section) and the soap shavings.

I turned the heat on to medium and stirred the mix every 10-15 minutes. It took about 30 minutes for the soap to appear all melted and then I turned the heat off and moved the pot to a cool burner. I continued to stir every 15-30 minutes. After about 2 hours it started to "gel" for lack of a better term. I let it set for about 30 minutes and came back to what seemed like jello. But I stirred it for a couple minutes and it came back to a nice, smooth, soap-like consistency. But I felt it was too thick so I added 12 more ounces of water and stirred for a couple more minutes. Then back to leaving it sit for 15-20 minutes before stirring some more.


I also added several drops of lemon essential oil.



Here is a picture of the microplaner, in case you didn't know what I meant by that. This is the mixture after sitting for a couple hours, and having been stirred every so often.



It takes on kind of a "snot" like consistency.

After about 5 hours, I felt the consistency was right and I poured it into an empty, clean half gallon milk jug, and one empty, clean liquid soap dispenser. It feels good and it smells good.



So here's the recipe:

2 ounce bar of soap, grated
76 ounces of water
1 Tbsp glycerin
12-15 drops of essential oil (optional)

Good luck! Make something nice-smelling! :)