acrafterslife

Does the thought of lye soap make your skin crawl or send you cringing into the corner thinking about grandmothers lye soap that would take your skin off?

Come on outta that corner and take a walk with me. See, soapmaking has come a long way since the days of measuring the oil in a container and dumping a can of lye in with it.

Now we have digital scales to weight the oil and lye to the .1 of an oz. We also know the saponification value of most oils. Saponification value tells us how much lye that particular oil can react with. And we know the minimum amount of water it will take to carry that amount of lye throughout the specified amount of oil. Those three things make it possible to make a natural soap that is absolutely wonderful for your skin.

Now we get into the properties of the different oils. While hog lard, with which our ancestors made soap, could make a very nice soap, it doesn’t have all the skin loving properties and ability to make that luxurious lather we associate with getting clean. (Lather isn’t really necessary, it’s a psychological thing.)

I like to start with a base of olive oil because it’s as good for you on the outside as it is on the inside. It’s the vegetable oil that most closely matches the oils produced by the human skin. Then I like to add some palm oil to help make the soap hard, and some coconut and/or palm kernel oil for lather. There! You have a basic soap . If you want extra moisturizer or your skin is sensitive, you can add things like cocoa butter, shea butter, (any vegetable butter), avocado oil, etc.

It takes a bit of research to learn the properties of all the oils, and some experimentation to find a blend that suits you, but all the information is available on the internet and your local library probably has books with lots of pictures to show you what each step is supposed to look like.