Animal Free Soap
Ingredients:
WATER: FREE (feel free to use distilled, or any type of water you can buy)
OIL: $8.00 (depends on what oil is used must be pure, 100%)
LYE: $5.00 (Red Devil brand sold in supermarkets with Drain Cleaner)
What else you will need:
Mold (must be wood, plastic, or cardboard)
Wax paper (mold lining)
Large Stainless Steel Pot
Thermometer (cooking, I used a Candy thermometer)
Scale, or Balance for weight. (A must have)
Process:
Safety:
The disclaimer “Children need an adult to do most of the work” is on almost all Soap-making web pages. This is simply because Lye (Sodium Hydroxide, Caustic Soda) is used to trace the fat. Lye is a strong Base, meaning it takes Hydrogen easily, where an Acid would give Hydrogen atoms. Trace is an important step in soap making, and coincidently, the fun part.
Chemistry:
Many can remember the movie Fight Club, when before making soap Brad Pitt and Edward Norton brake into a liposuction clinic to steel human fat to use in their soap. This is because it is said that the “harder” the soap the better. For this reason it is said that other animal fats make great soaps, beef, pig, etc.
One who does not want to use animal fat, such as myself must find another way…OILS!!! The thing that you must under stand is that Fats and Oils are very similar to each other in terms of Molecular Structure. Both are what we call Lipids, or even more specific, Triglyceride (three fatty acids with one glycerol). Fat is a solid at room temperature, while Oil is liquid, this is because of how much hydrogen is on one fatty acid chain, which in turn is determined to where, and how many double bonds there are between carbon atoms (saturation).
Using oil for soap is supposed to be good for your skin, in different ways than fat. Also, different oils have different structures, olive oil, canola oil, vegetable oil and so on, and therefore have different suds and effects when used for soap. For example, olive oil yields small, silky bubble, where vegetable oil (actually soy oil), is a bigger bubble.
MAKING THE SOAP
Step one is measuring out the materials, we can not use volumes in this measurement because it has to be accurate enough for all the base (LYE) to react with the fat. Washing yourself using soap with LYE left over would not be fun!! With this in mind, measure out the weight of fat. This part can be complicated. Once you know the weight of fat you have to figure out how much water and lye to use. This can be done with the table below. It is recommended that soap that will wash hands and shower with, that the 5% column is used (or any green section, 5-8%). This is the percent of fat you will have left over in your soap. So, if there is 300 grams of olive oil, all you need to do is multiply that by .129, . This means you need 38.7 g of LYE. Next simply multiply the Fat weight by .38, to get the mass of water needed. , 300 grams of fat would need 114 grams of water.
| Vegetable Fat | 0% | 1% | 2% | 3% | 4% | 5% | 6% | 7% | 8% | 9% | 10% |
| Canola Oil Castor Oil Coconut Corn Oil Cottonseed Olive Oil Palm Oil Peanut Oil Safflower Soybean Sunflower |
0.137 0.129 0.184 0.136 0.138 0.136 0.142 0.136 0.136 0.136 0.137 |
0.136 0.127 0.182 0.134 0.137 0.134 0.141 0.134 0.134 0.134 0.135 |
0.134 0.126 0.180 0.133 0.136 0.133 0.139 0.133 0.133 0.133 0.134 |
0.133 0.125 0.178 0.131 0.134 0.131 0.138 0.131 0.131 0.131 0.132 |
0.131 0.123 0.177 0.130 0.133 0.130 0.136 0.130 0.130 0.130 0.131 |
0.130 0.122 0.175 0.129 0.131 0.129 0.135 0.129 0.129 0.129 0.130 |
0.129 0.121 0.173 0.127 0.130 0.127 0.133 0.127 0.127 0.127 0.128 |
0.127 0.120 0.171 0.126 0.129 0.126 0.132 0.126 0.126 0.126 0.127 |
0.126 0.118 0.169 0.125 0.127 0.125 0.131 0.125 0.125 0.125 0.126 |
0.125 0.117 0.167 0.123 0.126 0.123 0.129 0.123 0.123 0.123 0.124 |
0.123 0.116 0.166 0.122 0.125 0.122 0.128 0.122 0.122 0.122 0.123 |
| Weight of water needed = Total weight of fat in recipe times 0.38 | |||||||||||
[NOTE ON TABLE: the red means less fat left over in soap (only 0-4%), therefore the stronger the soap. These strong soaps are good for large jobs like laundry.]
Finally, with all the materials weighed out, you can add the lye to the water in the large pot, and make sure it has diluted well. Then add the oil, VERY CAREFULLY. Now, with the heat turned up as hot as it can go start stirring the mixture. This part can take a while, especially when making a large batch. This heating process accelerates the process in the long run…considerably. Keep stirring the pot until you see it TACE. Trace can be described as when the mixture is thick enough so the lines from stirring stay long enough for you to see them (it looks like pudding). This happens when the mixture is approaching 300-350 degrees. Transfer the pot into a sink filled with cold water, or an even bigger pot filled with water, simply to cool the mixture down fast.
This is the part that calls for creativity, if you want to be creative. Right now, if you were to poor the mixture into a mold and let it sit until it gets hard (2-3days) it would be a good, plain soap. To make it a great soap, while it is cooling in your sink, you can add practically anything you can think of. This can be scented oils, (should be Essential Oils, bath oils used to make fragrant baths work great), oats for an abrasive, or other oils that have properties that help your skin (i.e. avocado oil). This is the part that customizes your soap to what you want, so find your own soap that fits best!
Poor it in your mold, you can see how think it should be. Your mold should be lines with wax paper, so you can get the soap out when it’s done.
After a day, or when it is starting to get hard, cut the soap into bars, and you are done.
When I made it:
I made sure to use only natural fats and materials when constructing my soap. Instead of using Cardboard for my mold I used a small wooden box, that way I could use it over and over. Glass would do the same. The first batch I used Vegetable Oil, and then added Oats as an abrasive. I soon found out that the smell wasn’t that great with Oats alone, so I made another batch. The second time I used Olive oil, and put natural lavender fragrance in it (Luckily my mom had it in her bath oils). This was it. The soap consistence was terrific, and the scent was, to my surprise, awesome.