Natural Handmade Soap

What Goes Into the Creation of Quality Handcrafted Soap?

This Oats & Honey Soap is a beautiful bar that's soothing for sensitive and eczema-prone skin. It's made with homemade oat milk, colloidal oatmeal and raw local honey. Unscented and colorant-free.
© HomesteadJoys.com

Crafting handmade soap involves a blend of science awareness and artistry skills.

This requires meticulous attention to detail, precision, and patience from the artisan, across the several stages of soap making.

It also requires time, testing, trial and error, always striving to perfect the final outcome. 

From the time-consuming efforts of careful recipe formulation, managing the transformative chemical process of saponification, and creative customization, to the finishing touches and lengthy curing period, heart and attention permeate each bar of soap. 

The Three Basic Ingredients in Homemade Soap

Genuine, old-fashioned soap is made of the same traditional ingredients that has been used for thousands of years. Nowadays we refer to it as cold process soap making.

Basic handcrafted soap fundamentally requires three main components:

• Oils and Fats: which are natural organic compounds
• Water, or other liquid like milk, coffee, juice, herbal water infusions, etc.
• Lye which is a strong alkali base - usually sodium hydroxide or potassium hydroxide.

Additives That Enhance Handmade Soaps

Made from fresh raw cow's milk, local raw honey, and locally grown Lavender infused into the oils, this Milk and Honey Tallow Soap is a winner! It's a deeply moisturizing, gentle bar yielding a generous, bubbly lather.
© HomesteadJoys.com

Additives that can be used in handmade soap are nearly limitless. They offer generous opportunities for customization and creativity. They enhance the look, feel, and skin benefits. Additives can cater to specific skin needs, add color or scent, enhance lather, exfoliate, deep clean, or moisturize. 

Here on our homestead, many times soapmaking begins with foraging for specific herbs, leaves, or flowers for their beneficial properties, to infuse into the oils for the soap.

It may involve preparing fresh raw milk from our cow, or obtaining local raw honey to make our wonderfully moisturizing Milk & Honey Soaps. Or making homemade oat milk for our soothing Oats & Honey Soap... 

Each additive is chosen with care and purpose to achieve optimal cleansing experience for the user when the soap is fully cured. See Natural Soap Additives for more ideas.

Why Does Natural Soap Cost More?

Handmade soap is typically more expensive than most store-bought soaps because, instead of chemicals, detergents and cleansers, soap makers use organic or high-quality ingredients which are more expensive. 

Careful attention is to craftsmanship. Creating handmade soaps is time and labor intensive, with a slow curing process taking several weeks, resulting in a product designed to care for your skin. Made in small batches with premium components and various natural additives that ensure skin-nourishing benefits, handmade soap offers so much more than industrial synthetics and efficiency.

You can't compare store-bought synthetic detergent cleaning bars with pure, healthy, natural soap, made with natural ingredients, intention, and care. They are very different products. 

How to Store Homemade Soap

The best way to store handmade soap bars long term is to keep them in a cool, dry place, out of direct sunlight, with good airflow. This helps to maintain its hardness and the soap's natural scent. It can be kept in a cupboard, a cardboard box, or basket. It's best to avoid sealed plastic or humid spots.

A Brief History of Soap Making
Who Made the First Soap?

A woman making soap. By Photographer Frank Hohenberger who came to live in Brown County in 1917 to chronicle daily life.

Handmade soap is one of the most ancient products you use. Who made the first soap? Hints have been left down the ages, but no one really knows exactly when or how it was discovered... 

However, we can image that soap likely originated as a by-product of an ancient cooking fire over which a large chunk of meat was roasting. Most probably, globs of fat dripping into ashes, resulting in a chemical reaction that created a slippery substance which turned out to be great at lifting dirt off skin, and allowing it to be washed away. 

Various written recipes for soap date back nearly 5,000 years, originating from Mesopotamia, Egypt, ancient Greece, and Rome. As the process was refined over the centuries, written recipes for soap making began to appear, with variations reflecting the different people groups.

Aleppo Bar Soap. Savon de Marseille and Aleppo soap are well known modern soaps based on century old techniques, with Nabulsi soap tracing its roots all the way to the 10th century.

The text from one alchemist’s manual published sometime between the eighth and 10th centuries reads as follows: “Spread well burnt ashes from good logs over woven wickerwork. ...Gently pour hot water on them so it goes through drop by drop… After it is clarified well, let it cook... Add enough oil and stir very well.” Mappae Clavicula, ca. 1130 AD. 

The "wickerwork" filtered the water through the ashes, creating a crude lye solution. This liquid, collected in a pot underneath, was the "first lye of the soapmaker". The recipe continues by instructing the user to strain the lye multiple times to strengthen it, then boil it with olive oil or animal fat (tallow) to create soap through a process called saponification.

Water, lye, and fats remain the three basic ingredients for making soap to this day.