Making Soap: Huge Bar of Natural Soap
Last week I made a huge bar of natural soap. Soap making is a hobby that I have never tried before. With the necessary safety precautions taken, it turned out not being difficult at all. I made my own mold just the other day. The natural soap that I made using equal parts of coconut oil and olive oil turned out just great. The lather is amazing, skin turns soft again, wonderful. I have 3000 grams of this stuff, cut up into 22 bars. These will serve as nice homemade Christmas gifts in a few weeks…
The recipe can be found by clicking this link.
Video transcript:
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Tony Needs Hobbies. My name is Tony and today we are going to do a little chemistry experiment. Let’s make some soap.
Apart from the safety gear we will use a stainless steel pot, a good quality scale, some soap colorant, essential oils, this soap mold that I made yesterday, a stick blender, a stainless steel spoon, olive oil, coconut oil, a beaker and a thermometer, demineralized water and sodium hydroxide to make the lye.
Soap making is a fun activity but it uses a caustic chemical: sodium hydroxide. That’s why you always need to wear safety glasses, safety gloves, long sleeves and long trousers.
This soap mold can produce 12 bars of soap measuring 3 by 4 by 1 inches. I will be using these ingredients and I will also put them in a list in the description below. I start by measuring the water, then measuring the amount of sodium hydroxide that I need. I will add the sodium hydroxide to the water. You never add the water to the sodium hydroxide, that’s very important. It will get very hot and it will start boiling and splatter all around the place. It’s very dangerous. Always add the sodium hydroxide to the water, not the other way around. Now we add the sodium hydroxide to the water. We do this carefully and we stir it with a stainless steel spoon. You cannot use aluminium cookware because it will dissolve in the solution that we are creating. Also you shouldn’t use a wooden spoon and after using cookware for creating soap you cannnot use it for cooking any more.
You can see it’s 93 degrees. It’s almost boiling temperature so we’re going to put it aside and let it cool down a bit. Now it’s time to dissolve and mix the oils together. I will use a little bit of heat for that but not too much because the lye is also very hot and I don’t want too much heat at this part of the process.
It’s almost time for saponification. The oils are mixed together. Time to get the lye, add it to this mixture and start blending. I will do that with the heat off. This stage is called trace. When we move the stick blender through the mixture you can see that it leaves a trace. If I would have been making cold process soap this was the stage where I should pour it in the mold but I’m making hot process soap so I will put this in an oven that is preheated to 90 degrees Celsius and I will put a lid on top.
Yes, that’s nice. That looks wonderful. It looks like soap. So we let it cool down for a slight bit, then add the colorants and the essential oils and then pour it into the mold. I put some parchment paper in it so that the soap won’t stick to the wood. I continue preparations of the molding process by setting aside the essential oils and the colorants. We have to move quick because the temperature will drop and then it will solidify but we don’t want it to be solid in this pan.
This is a black colorant, I want the soap to be masculine. Now I add the essential oils. I’m going for a woody smell. I really love cedar wood so that’s what I put in here: cedar and orange.
I will show you how I do the pH test. I dissolve some leftover soap and I’ll take a piece of pH paper, dip it in the solution and look for the matching color.
It’s almost a day later now time to look at the results. This huge bar of soap that I made, it’s just too huge to use So I will cut it into bars.
That’s it for this video. I made 22 of these very fat bars of soap. They’re very big but as you can see they are not black. I intended to make black soap but the dye started flaking as soon as I added it to the soap mixture. I’m not so happy with that but for now this is fine. The bars are ready to use now but if you let them cure for about two to four weeks they will dry out a bit more and they will last a bit longer in the shower.
I would like to thank you for watching this video. I hope you learned a little about making soap, I know I learned a lot about making soap and I had a lot of fun doing it. If you have liked this video please subscribe by hitting the subscribe button below.
For now, I would like to conclude by saying bye, bye!
