Homemade Soap: Squeaky Clean, Or It Works!

UPDATED: 2/5/2023

In our prior post, which you can read here, we shared what led us to attempt making our own soap. We covered the tools we used, the fun choices we made (like soap color and scent), and the process we followed. While everything seemed to go well, the question remained: Would this soap actually work?

Where we last left you, the soap was in liquid form and had been poured into the mold. Depending on the exact ingredients that render the soap more or less hard, the soap will need to cure (harden) over a variable number of days. In our case, we added several ingredients (coconut oil and olive oil) that required about 3 weeks worth of curing in the mold. By comparison, some recipes only take about a week to cure.

After testing that the soap was solid enough to be cut, Dustin removed it from the mold. The mold itself is a wood tray with a rubber sleeve settled inside of it. So, after dumping the rubber sleeve out, it was easy to peel that back from the soap itself. From there, he placed the long rectangular soap into the previously purchased cutter. The cutter works similar to a manual bread cutter: There are spaces along the wood cutter that allow the knife to slice through the soap easily.

What we were left with were about 14 bars of a bright twilight blue soap that sure looked and felt like soap! While we scented these with sandalwood and used about 1/3 the recommended amount of scent, they have enough of a smell to be pleasant without overpowering.

From there, we wrapped each bar in parchment paper and used regular Scotch tape to seal them.

Once our prior bar of soap was ready for a replacement, we started using this soap. Some of the characteristics we were curious to check out: would the soap melt away at a similar or different pace to other soap and would it create an appropriate level of suds? After a full week of using this soap, it appears to get used up at about the same rate - possibly slightly faster - than other more ‘natural’ brand soaps that we have used. And it creates a very satisfying level of suds. While technically soap does not need to have suds to clean, most of us are conditioned to be used to that and expect it. Whenever we have tried natural products that do not have a sudsing characteristic, it’s disarming.

So, victory! Our next plan is to pull out the rest of the bars of lard that are still in the freezer and make another batch. We used up less than half of the amount of lard with this first soap making adventure. Dustin is already pressing for the next scent to be ‘fresh cut grass,’ but that definitely will not be happening. In fact, he may even find that scent missing under suspicious circumstances…

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