How to Find Soap Recipes

If you’re a newcomer to soapmaking, welcome! Making soap at home is a great way to help the environment, clear up any skin problems, teach your kids to connect bathtime with fun, and, oh yes…stay clean! Making soap at home is super-fun, but soapmaking can be serious chemistry – with certain types of soap, you’ll have to follow a recipe or you'll end up with goop! Keep reading for places you can look to find soap recipes, from basic to advanced.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• internet access
• library

1. If you’ve never made soap at home before, it’ll help to know what type of soap you’d like to make. There are three basic types of soaps you can easily make at home: Glycerin (a.k.a. ‘melt and pour’) soaps, cold/hot-process, and re-batch (a.k.a. ‘hand-milled’). Many people, especially those with young children at home, prefer to work with glycerin because it colors beautifully, is simple to use and avoids the use of toxic chemicals (lye) in the home. Both cold-process and hot-process soaps are created by blending lye and fats together at a high temperature, and re-batch soaps are soaps that are made by melting small pieces of cold/hot process soaps and re-molding them. Do some research to figure out what type of soap/s will work best in your home environment.

2. Head to your local library to see what kinds of books they have on soapmaking. Soapmaking books typically explain the process of making each type of soap, then list recipes for ways to achieve different soap ‘effects.’ If you’re working with glycerin, a favorite of mine is a book from the UK called Soaps, by Elaine Stavert. It has gorgeous illustrations and great recipes for all kinds of unique glycerin soaps.

3. If you prefer to work primarily with cold/hot process soaps or intend to do some rebatching, both The Everything Soapmaking Book by Alicia Grosso and Country Living’s Handmade Soap are great, helpful reads with lots of pictures and recipes. A must-have book for soapmaking beginners, Handmade Soap is particularly useful because it contains seven basic soap recipes that range from simple to fairly complicated. Each of these recipes produces an unscented, off-white to light yellow bar of soap that can then be colored and scented in any way you choose. Handcrafted Soap, by Delores Boone, is another great soapmaking book that is geared primarily to hot-process soapmakers.

4. If you find a great recipe but its yield isn’t large enough (i.e.: it doesn’t produce enough bars - *See my note below in ‘Tips’ regarding doubling soap recipes), take a look on the internet to see whether you can find a similar recipe with a larger yield. You can try Googling the individual ingredients to see if you can find a recipe, or you can try one of the many soapmaking websites, nearly all of which have tons of soap recipes. You can find a list of soap recipes, soapmaking forums and more on the Soap Making Essentials website at http://www.soap-making-essentials.com/.

5. Most soap recipes are broken down into the basic ingredients (distilled water, lye, and fats) and the essential oils and additives. If you’re looking for a basic soap recipe but have a recipe for, say lemon soap, you can also just follow the author’s recipe for combining the basic ingredients and ignore the essential oils and additives the author has suggested, substituting your own or leaving the soap plain and unscented.

Tips & Warnings

• In general, it’s not a great idea to double a soap making recipe to increase your yield. Soapmaking is an exact chemistry, and the ratio of lye vs. fats you will need to make one batch of a particular recipe may change substantially if you want to make more. For beginning soapmakers especially, or those unfamiliar with using a lye calculator, it’s better to look for a recipe that will suit your needs without needing to be doubled.

Resources

• Soap Making Essentials website

[solutionsforu]

on 11/11/2009 Good article on How to Find Soap Recipes. 5*