How to Make Beautiful Designer Soap

Make your own designer soaps at home.

Making your own designer soap is a project that you can do with very little soap-making experience. Better yet, you can create soaps in the colors, shapes, sizes and scents that you choose. Designer soaps can be purchased in stores and can be pretty expensive. They look nice, but you have to take what the store has in stock whether you want that particular soap or not. However, using only a few supplies and a straightforward soap-making method, you can make your own designer soap. Keep the soap for yourself or wrap it up and give it to your loved ones as a gift.

Things You'll Need

• Microwave-safe mixing bowl
• Soap base
• Plastic wrap
• Additives (fragrance oils and/or colorants)
• Soap molds (hearts, stars, circles, squares, etc.)
• Rubbing alcohol in a spray bottle
• Freezer
• Airtight storage container

Instructions

Making the Embeds

1. Break your soap base into smaller pieces and place them into a mixing bowl.

2. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and place the bowl in the microwave. Heat it on high for one minute. Remove the bowl from the microwave and remove/discard the plastic wrap.

3. Stir in any fragrance oil or colorant you wish to add to the soap.

4. Pour the soap carefully into your special-shaped molds. Spray any exposed soap with rubbing alcohol to prevent air bubbles from forming.

5. Allow the soap to harden, which can take two to 24 hours. Remove the soap from the molds and place it into the freezer. Allow the soap to freeze for 24 hours. These frozen pieces of soap are the embeds, or the pieces you'll embed into the finished bar of soap.

Making Designer Soap

1. Place one or more frozen embeds into a soap mold that is larger than the embed itself.

2. Melt your soap base and pour it into the mold with the embed inside.

3. Spray any exposed soap with rubbing alcohol and allow soap to harden for two to 24 hours.

4. Remove soap from the mold and store it in an airtight container or plastic wrap when not in use.

Tips & Warnings

• Specialty soap-making supplies (molds, soap base, colorant or fragrance oils) can be purchased in soap-making supply shops or online.

• You can grate or shave off curls of soap from other bars of soap and freeze those to use as imbeds as well.

• Make sure that your imbeds are completely frozen to ensure that they don't melt when the soap base is poured over them.

References

• Suds N' Scents: Melt & Pour Designer Loaf Soap Instructions
• Teach Soap: Basic Melt and Pour Soap Tutorial