Combining Water & Lye to Make Homemade Soap

Video Transcript

"I’m going to start turning on and zeroing out my scale with the container on the scale. That way as I measure the water I am only measuring the weight of the water. One advantage of being outdoors. I am setting this aside. The next thing I will do is measure out the lye. I find that it is a convenient step to measure it in a baggie so that if you have to carry this or handle this or if you have to pause in the process you can close it up. Once again, we will zero the scale; 6 ¾. Promptly cover your lye. That’s my bag. This is the mixing of the water and the lye. Now it is very important, critical that you add the lye to the water and not the other way around. As I pour this in it is going to get near boiling and so if you poured a little water in this bag of lye, it could explode. So I am going to pour this very slowly and gradually. I am going to be very careful that I don’t produce a lot of dust. As I stir it I want to make sure that I don’t get a lump in the bottom because it is real hard to get rid of a lump once you created it. I also lean back a little bit because there is no way I am going to be breathing these fumes. It is getting very hot as I can already tell just with my hands even with gloves on and I found it kind of tends to cake up on the spoon. You don’t want any kind of build up with the lye. The goggles and the gloves always seem awkward and unnecessary until I start doing this. You breathe a little of those fumes and you start how feeling how hot it gets and you realize how important it is to protect yourself from this material. Now it is all stirred together and insert the thermometer. Make sure the bulb is not hitting the bottom of the container just a little above the container’s bottom, immersed in the liquid. I’ve got it turned to where I can read it and sure enough we are already at 175 degrees Fahrenheit. Now this is going to cool down to about 115 degrees and it will take a little while so while this is cooling we are going to mix our oils and warm them up and we are going to prepare our molds. "