Liquid Soap
Let’s Make a Basic Liquid Soap
Are you comfortable with the basics of cold process soap making? Looking for a new challenge - a new delight in your shower? Liquid soap is more complicated, takes a lot of patience, and a few changes in your soap making process, but if you follow the steps carefully, is not too hard.
The major difference between bar soaps and liquid soaps is the alkali used to saponify the oils. All soap, whether hard or liquid, starts with a simple chemical reaction between oils and an alkali. With bars soaps, it’s sodium hydroxide. With liquid soaps, it’s potassium hydroxide.
As I said, liquid soap is a bit more complicated, so for beginners, it’s best to use a tried and true recipe. The recipe I’m using is based on a recipe from Ellen Peacock of Ellen’s Essentials. It’s a simple, easy to follow, reliable recipe with a good balance of lather and moisturizing.
For this recipe you’ll need:
* 16.5 oz. Sunflower Oil
* 7 oz. Coconut Oil
* 5.5 oz. Potassium Hydroxide KOH
* 16.5 oz. Distilled Water for the Lye Mixture
* 40 oz. Distilled Water to dilute the soap paste
* Either 2 oz. of boric acid or 3 oz. of borax mixed into 10 or 6 oz. of water
* Approx. 3 oz. Fragrance or Essential oil, as desired
* Soap dye or colorant, if desired
You’ll also need:
* Basic tools etc. for mixing the lye
* Large crock pot
* Thermometer, scale, measuring cups
* Stick blender
* (Recommended) Potato Masher and/or flat whisk
* (Required) Several heaping measures of patience!
Got all of that?
Let’s get started!
Another major difference with liquid soap is that that it is a “hot process” soap - instead of relying on the heat generated by the saponification process, heat is added using a double boiler, oven or crock pot. This recipe can be done in a double boiler or the oven, but I prefer using a crock pot. It keeps everything in one pot and lets it cook evenly without having to monitor the water in a double boiler. (The crock pot I use is a Rival Crock Pot and I like it a lot.)
But let’s det down to soap making.
Measure out your oils and put them in the crock pot on low. You want this mixture to be at about 160 degrees (give or take 10) throughout.
While the oils are heating up, mix your lye-water, using the standard lye-making procedure. If you’ve never used potassium hydroxide before, don’t be alarmed. It’s a bit more volatile in the water than sodium hydroxide - it makes this odd boiling/groaning sound as it’s dissolving. This is normal.
When the lye-water is completely mixed and clear, slowly add it into your oils. (No, you don’t need to wait until it is cool.) Don’t turn the stick blender on just yet…just stir the oils and lye together.
Then, like in cold process soap making, start blasting it with the stick blender. At first it will seem to want to separate. Keep blending.
Here’s where your first measure of added patience will be needed. Depending on your mixture of oils, it will take a long time to get to trace. Sometimes as much as 30 minutes. “Trace” for liquid soap looks pretty much like cold process - kind of pudding like - perhaps more like a blend of pudding and applesauce - with the characteristic “traces” and/or ridges when you dribble the soap back into the pot or stir. You can’t really stir it too much, so it’s best to make sure you’ve got a good solid trace before moving to the next step.
Once the soap has reached trace you’ll need your next measure of patience. Give the soap one more good stir, shake off your stick blender, put the lid on the pot, and start waiting.
Check on the soap in about 15-20 minutes. If there’s any separation, just stir it back up and put the lid back on. Keep checking on the soap every 20-30 minutes or so.
In the 3-4 hours or so it will take this soap to cook, it will transform and go through several “stages” - don’t worry if you don’t see one, sometimes a stage will be brief and you’ll miss it. The “stages” I usually see are:
1. Thick applesauce
2. Cooked custard with small bubbles
3. Watery mashed potatoes
4. Solid taffy
5. Chunky/creamy vaseline
6. Translucent vaseline
Keep stirring every 30 minutes or so through each of the stages. It will be difficult (or even darn near impossible) to stir through the taffy stage - do the best you can. The potato masher will help break the taffy up. Then, just when you think it’s never going to finish, it will start to get creamy and move into the vaseline stage, getting more translucent.
Once you’ve reached the 3-4 hour mark, and the soap has softened and turned translucent, it’s time to test it to see if it’s cooked long enough. Take two ounces of boiling water and add one ounce of your soap paste. Stir the soap, breaking it up and helping it dissolve in the water. Once it’s completely dissolved (several minutes) check to see how clear it is. If it’s just very lightly cloudy, that’s o.k. It may be your combination of oils. Also, the soap will “settle” after it’s finished and get even clearer. But if the dissolved soap mixture is milky or very cloudy, you’ve either not cooked it long enough or you’ve mis-measured somewhere.
If the test mixture stays clear as it cools, you’re good to go. But here’s where you’ll need your last measure of patience - diluting the paste. Take your remaining 40 oz. of distilled water and bring it to a boil. Add the water to the soap paste. Stir it in a bit with a spoon or the potato masher.
Turn the heat off on the crock pot. Put the lid on and wait.
After a while - an hour or so, stir it some more. It should have softened some by now, but will likely still be very chunky and gooey. Put the lid back on and wait some more.
I often plan my liquid soap batches so that at this point I can just put the lid on and go to bed, leaving it to sit overnight and dissolve. But if you want to take a more active role, just keep waiting and stirring, waiting and stirring. The potato masher will help to break up some of the larger chunks of paste, but nothing will help more than just waiting.
In addition to the different alkali, and the cooking of the soap, liquid soap is different from bar soap in the way it is formulated. If you run most recipes through a lye calculator you’ll see that there seems to be way too much lye! Indeed, liquid soap recipes are usually formulated with about a 10% lye EXCESS. This is to ensure that all of the oils are saponified.(Note: For a more detailed explanation of this, be sure to read Lye Excess in Liquid Soap Making) The excess lye is neutralized in this step.
After the soap paste has completely dissolved in the water, it’s time to neutralize the soap and add your fragrance.
Turn the crock pot back on and bring the mixture back up to 180 degrees or so.
In a separate container, mix your neutralizing solution. You can make either a 20% boric acid solution or a 33% borax (20 Mule Team) solution. For the boric acid, take 8 oz. of boiling water and add 2 oz. boric acid. For the borax, use 3 oz. borax in 6 oz. of boiling water. It’s important to stir very well and make sure that it stays very hot. As this mixture cools, the borax or boric acid will start to precipitate out of the mixture - and it won’t mix into your soap!
Add about 3/4 oz. of neutralizer for every pound of soap paste (just the paste, not the added water.) So, for this recipe which has about 2.8 lb of paste, we’re going to add 2 oz. (2.13 rounded down to 2) of neutralizer solution. Too much neutralizer (especially the boric acid solution) can cause cloudiness, so it’s best to round down and/or err on the conservative side.
Slowly pour the neutralizer into the re-heated soap mixture and stir well. Add one ounce first and let it sit for a bit. Then add another half ounce. Then, if you still have no cloudiness, add the final half ounce.
After you’ve neutralized the soap, but while it’s still hot, it’s time to add your fragrance and color, if desired.
I generally fragrance my liquid soaps at about 2-3%. So for this batch this was about 3 oz. of fragrance. I used a combination of lavender and bois de rose essential oils.
Add the fragrance to the soap and stir well. Likewise, if you’re adding color (remember to take the amber color of the soap base into your coloring), add it a few drops at a time, stirring well.
Let the soap cool and pour it into large bottles or jars. Put it aside in a cool place and just let it rest. Any minor cloudiness caused by insoluble particles in the oils in your recipe or added fragrance oils should clear up in this time. During this resting phase, the insoluble particles should settle to the bottom. When you are pouring your soap into their final bottles or tubes, just make sure leave this milky layer behind.
Thats it. liquid soap made. If you need more help or would like to make more spa products at home you might want to take a look at my new book. it has over 100 spa products to make.
