Making Natural Soap

People often start making soap from home because they want a product that is more natural and lacking in chemicals than the soaps commonly available on the market. Many beginning soap makers ask for recipes for natural soap just for this reason.

Homemade soap of any sort is vaatly more natural than mass-produced soap. Fragrance oils (as opposed to essential oils) made specifically for soap making are not natural, neither are soap dyes, and it’s probably safe to question how “natural” shortening is, if you use that in your soap.

What I think most people mean when they ask about natural candles is those made without meat by-products such as tallow or lard. These are the traditional ingredients used to make candles in the old days, because you have to have a fat to bind with the lye in order to make soap at all.

The good news for vegetarians and others who simply don’t want to wash up with something that used to be an animal is that there are a lot of recipes out there for vegetable-based soaps. I’ll show you some good sources here in a minute.

Other would-be soap makers may be wondering about the use of lye in their soap. Lye is natural, of course, it’s sodium hydroxide, and generally comes as a byproduct of burning wood.

Still, many people are afraid of lye because it’s extremely caustic, it can cause burns, blindness, death to animals and children if ingested, etc. When using lye it’s best to have protection for your eyes, hands and skin, and to cover your work surface should any of the lye granules escape the melt pot. You won’t want to breathe the fumes, either.

The first soaps were made from animal fat and wood ashes boiled together. While that doesn’t sound very appealing, our foremothers were onto something. Lye is a really great cleaner and can actually be gentle in the right proportions (use too much and you could cause burns).

And you actually can’t make soap without lye, so it’s time to get over your lye fear and make some soap.

For the purposes of this article, we’ll take natural to mean no animal products and no chemical oils. Perhaps “earth friendly” or “vegetarian friendly” would be a more appropriate description.

Here are some good sources for natural soap recipes:

• Soap Naturally has links to more than 100 soap recipes, None of the ones I looked through involved animal products, but some of them do call for fragrance oils that could not be found as essential oils. Some also include food coloring, which doesn’t sound very natural to me (and could certainly be left out without damaging the chemistry.

• Miller Soap has an excellent collection of all-vegetable soap recipes. This site helpfully divides recipes into those using shortening, those with palm oil, palm-oil free recipes and castile soap (olive oil base) concoctions. Most of these either don’t call for fragrance or use essential oils. One cleverly suggests paprika as a coloring agent (another uses crayons).

• Lizzie Candle offers a basic veggie-friendly recipe that allows you to customize with whatever essential oil you like. It also suggests adding ground dried herbs, which is an excellent touch that makes your soaps even more variable.

• Some of the soaps at Majestic Mountain Sage don’t fall into the veggie-friendly category, but there are enough good recipes here to make up for the presence of deer-tallow soap. This site is full of good information for soap makers at all levels.

• Cranberry Lane has some excellent recipes (in a PDF pamphlet) and also sells a lot of natural ingredients for soap making, including all natural soap dyes.

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