How to Make Soap: Cold Process Method Explained

Meet the Maker March challenge continues with the question “how do you make it?”

This article will briefly explain the cold processed soap making process.

It all starts with a recipe which lists the oils, amount of lye, water, essential oils and any botanicals added to the formula.

Water is carefully measured out into a bowl. Lye is measured out and when added to the water the temperate sharply rises to above boiling, and gives off a caustic gas that can damage your lungs, eyes. Before mixing lye and water Steve puts on safety equipment – gloves, a mask and goggles. protection is essential because of the danger of lye. The lye water needs to cool down significantly and this can take 20-30 minutes (often dependant on the temperature in the studio).

In a seperate bowl measure out the oils used. Our soap uses a number of different oils which vary from recipe to recipe. Typically the mix includes olive oil, coconut oil and palm oil. These oils are carefully measured using a scale. The bowl of oil is put on a heating element and temperature raised to make sure that all of the oils are liquid. It will be important that the bowl of oils and the bowl of lye water are the same temperature.

In a seperate bowl the essential oil is measured out. Same with the botanicals and colorants (We use mica powder which is a natural colorant),

When the oils and the lye water are at the same temperature a blender stick is plugged in, and the lye water is carefully poured into the oils, blending vigorously until the mixture looks like pudding. At this point any botanicals and the essential oil is poured into the mix, and hand mixed.

Immediately the mixture is poured into a refrigerator paper lined wooden mold, and covered with another piece of refrigerator paper. (If soap was just poured into the wooden mold it would stick to the wood, and be difficult to come out. )

The mold of soap will sit for at least 24 hours to go through the chemical reaction known as saponification. The “pudding mix” is initially quite hot. As the soap mix cools the pH of the soap begins to slowly neutralize. Within 24 hours the “pudding” is now hard enough to be cut.

We have several soap cutting implements that allow us to turn each 4 pound slab of soap into 20 bars. Once the soap is cut we have drying racks – allowing the soap to fully neutralize in pH, as well as dry enough to be wrapped. We check the pH of the soap and do not wrap it until the pH is neutral

When the soap is ready we wrap each bar in a light wax paper (that you can smell the soap through) and place our label on each bar. Its now ready to sell and use.