Creating Your Own Soap Making Recipes

Creating your own soap making recipes from scratch can be a lot of fun. When you’re just starting out, using others soap recipes is a good way to learn things like how to be organized, working with lye, what is trace. Then when you start getting creative and making your own recipes… it’s awesome!

If you want to make soap to sell, you really need to understand what it is you’re doing, and if you’re using other people’s recipes then you’re missing that step. To continue your learning process, experimenting and devising your own recipes is the way to go.

Here you will find useful information for anybody wishing to understand how to come up with their own soap making recipes.

Step-by-Step Instructions To Create Your Own Soap Making Recipes

First of all, you must choose a method: cold process or hot process. Cold process is considered to be easier because it doesn’t have so many steps, but everyone is entitled to their opinion. You can read more about each process on this page.

Next, you need to decide what kind of soap are you making. Is it a pretty, decorative soap to give away as a gift? Is it super-fatted? Moisturizing? Are you including colorants, fragrances or additives?

After you have figured out what kind of soap you want, it’s time to understand how it’s all going to come together. Many questions come to mind when developing your own recipe. How do you calculate the size of the batch? How much fragrance per pound of soap?

This all purpose formula explains how the soap making process works in very general terms:

certain amount fat/oil + certain amount lye + water (optional additives) = soap

For super-fat soaps, you can add more oil/fat or reduce lye. If I want a better degreaser for laundry/dishes, you need to add more lye.

However, you can’t just “add a bit more lye” (or oil, for that matter). You need to know exactly how much more lye to add. If you want to change your recipe, you still need to run it through a lye calculator to be sure you make a safe and fun product to use.

If you changed any of the oils from your original recipe, then they require a different amount of lye to saponify. If you got it wrong, you can end up with lye heavy soap (dangerous) or oil heavy (not dangerous; you might like it or you might not like the soap).

Even if you’ve found a recipe from a reputable source, one should still run it through a lye calculator because sometimes people make mistakes.

If you’re making your own recipe from scratch, you need to learn how to use soapcalc. It may be scary at first, but it’s the best to calculate the exact quantities you need to make your soap. They have step-by-step instructions on how to use soapcalc.

Finally, there is more to putting together a formula than just trusting statistics in a soap calculator. I am quite convinced that there is a synergy that occurs among various combinations of different oils and butters, that results in a soap much greater than the sum of its parts.

So don’t be afraid to experiment and remember: “practice makes perfect”!