Homemade Peppermint Soap

If you have read any of our past blogs, I’m sure you have been blown away with our domestic goddessness and are not surprised in the least that we have successfully made our own soap. However, that is definitely not going to stop me from telling you all about it. So.. ladies (and gents) use up the rest of that body wash – forget about spending a million dollars on fancy handmade soap for your oh so sensitive skin and prepare to be amazed!

Our journey to being amazing soap makers started with one of my favorite things: books! We read and researched all about soap recipes, ingredients (omg we have to use LYE – but we’ll get to that later), processes and places to purchase said ingredients. We found that the best information and recipes were located in Susan Miller Cavitch’s The Soapmaker’s Companion: A Comprehensive Guide with Recipes, Techniques and Know- How. We also decided on Bramble Berry to purchase most of our ingredients and gathered together the rest of the materials needed.

First things first; the soap mold.
All soap recipes will require some sort of soap mold. We were lucky enough to enlist my dad in making ours and saved ourselves quite a bundle. Before you purchase a pricey soap mold, get the dimensions needed and make sure you don’t know a handy person to help you out.

Picking a Recipe
There are lots and lots of different soap recipes out there, and it can be a little overwhelming to choose just one – so we decided to just start with a basic recipe in Susan Miller Cavitch’s book. We used Soap Essentials Bar II, so.. here we go!

Ingredient List
201 grams sodium hydroxide (yikes I know, but you’ll be okay)
1 pound 3 ounces distilled water
1 pound 5 ounces olive oil
1 pound coconut oil
14 ounces palm oil
12 grams grapefruit seed extract
7 teaspoons pure essential oil or fragrance oil (optional)

Materials List
Hand mixer
Glass bowls
Several spoons
Candy thermometer
Dropper
Kitchen Scale
Stock pots
Protective eye wear
Rubber gloves
Wax paper
Plastic wrap, Ziploc bags or plastic containers with lids

The Process
1. Line your mold with wax paper (the book said to “miter the corners” we had no idea what that meant, but for you, I did a little google-ing and it means, “a surface forming the beveled end or edge of a piece where a joint is made by cutting two pieces at an angle and fitting them together” [thank you Merriam Webster] anyway we taped the corners to make sure everything was covered in the wax paper)
2. Measure out the essential oil (we used peppermint oil) and grapefruit seed extract and set them aside in tightly sealed containers
3. Now we get serious: put on your goggles and gloves.
4. Weigh the sodium hydroxide and set it aside
5. Set the glass container on the scale and add the water – remove from scale
6. Carefully add the sodium hydroxide to the water while stirring (you may want to open a window at this point, as the fumes can get bothersome, but if you don’t stick your face over the bowl and breathe deeply while stirring, you should be just fine) Stir until completely dissolved.
Set bowl aside, use candy thermometer to check the temperature. The reaction will heat the lye solution to over 200 degrees. Let cool down to 80-100 degrees.
7. While lye is cooling, begin mixing the oils.
8. Place palm oil and coconut oil into boiling water (oils will turn from solid to liquid)
9. Weigh olive oil - pour correct amounts of the palm oil and coconut oil into the same bowl as the olive oil and incorporate thoroughly (let cool to 80-100 degrees)
10. Make sure you have your goggles and gloves on again – here comes the lye!
11. Slowly pour the lye into the oils, stirring as quickly as possible. (the book says to stir by hand – or if using a mixer to put it on the lowest setting – we used hand mixer) Mix briskly – keeping as much of the mixture as possible in constant motion.
12. After about 5 minutes your mixture should begin to thicken and look uniform. Continue stirring/mixing firmly and briskly until “tracing” can occur. Cavitch says that tracing is when, “a small amount of soap drizzled across the solution’s surface leaves a faint pattern before sinking back into the mass”. We just used our best judgment on this one total stirring about 20 minutes.
13. Once you feel the tracing has occurred, you can add your essential oils and grapefruit seed extract. Mix until all oils have been incorporated.
14. Now you are ready to the pour the soap into your mold. Make sure everything is as even as possible. You can use a spatula to make the mixture even. At this point, it kind of looked like frosting.

Congrats to you – the hard part is over!

Curing and Cutting your Soap
1. Once your soap is poured, cover it (we used a piece of plywood that was slightly larger than our mold) with a lid and a blanket. Let the soap sit for 18-24 hours.
2. Uncover the soap (set it away from drafts or extreme temperatures) let it sit for 1-7 days or until firm enough to cut, but not rock hard. Ours sat for about 4 days.
3. Cut the soap – ideally you would use a ruler and make the bars uniform. Our bars are not so uniform – but functional just the same. I just used a regular kitchen knife with a smooth edge. This batch made about 32 pieces (various sizes)
4. Once the bars were cut, we slowly peeled the wax paper away from the bars.
5. Set the bars on plain brown paper grocery bags (we actually used wax paper and it worked fine, just don’t use anything with color or print or it will rub off onto your soap).
6. Set the bars away from extreme temperatures and allow to cure for 3 to 4 weeks, turning them over halfway through.

Yay, you’re finished!! Cavitch recommends using a breathable material to store your soap in.

Okay – so that is the process and recipe for the soap, it seems like a lot, but I can’t believe how smoothly it went on the actual soap making day. We, as we always do, had a blast making it. I think we have all been super impressed with how the soap turned out. I for one have sensitive dry skin, especially on my face, and can’t believe how wonderful the soap is on my skin. I typically have to use lotion on my face every day because of how dry it is, but I have been able to eliminate that with the use of this soap! It smells lovely and lathers (which excited us all) like any other soap I’ve used.

“Soap and water and common sense are the best disinfectants”