Friday, January 10, 2014

Homemade All Natural Liquid Hand Soap

I decided to try my hand at making homemade liquid hand soap. It was fun and super easy!

Ingredients you will need:
10 cups of distilled (or well) water
5 oz bar of castile soap (I used Dr. Bronner's Peppermint )
1 1/4 Tablespoons Vegetable Glycerine 
 15 drops Essential Oil (optional), I used Eucalyptus  

Step 1:
Grate the bar of soap

Step 2:
Pour distilled water into a large pot. Gently add grated soap, glycerin and essential oil (if using). 

Step 3:
Stir gently over medium heat until all of the soap has melted. 

Step 4:
Pour carefully into a large glass bowl and let sit for 12 hours (I did mine overnight)

How it looked when I left it to go to bed.

12 hours later! It is soap! Mine was solidish and smelled wonderful!

Step 5:
Blend gently with a hand mixer til smooth. At this point you can add a little bit more water to it til it is the texture/consistency that you prefer. 

Mine was perfect!

Step 6:
Pour carefully into containers for storage. I prefer to use glass for storage so that there is no chance of chemicals leaching out through plastic. If you aren't worried about that, then using the jug of water you got the distilled water from would work perfectly too. 

My batch yielded just a smidge under 3 quarts. 

Now, lets see how this compares to store bought hand soap...
 Walmart sells a 5.5 ounce pumper of hand soap for 98 cents. That makes it 18 cents per ounce. 

My cost:
$4.09 for the bar of soap
$.75 for the distilled water
$.53 for the glycerin
and the essential oil I already had so it was free 
(If you buy the essential oil then it would be around $5 for the bottle and then you used probably $.10 worth of oil in the batch of soap)
$5.37 total for 89 ounces of soap (two quarts = 64 ounces and then 25 ounces for the last quart jar which isn't completely filled)
Which ends up being..... drum roll please......
$0.06 per ounce! 

Six cents per ounce for all natural, safe liquid hand soap! 

*Note: I found the vegetable glycerin and the castile soap online at vitacost. I also found very affordable essential oils on their site. If you are wanting to start making your own cleaning and household supplies I would highly recommend purchasing from their site. Here is my referral link which will get you $10 off your first $30 purchase!

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