When sitting down to create this small business I had a tough time coming with what type of products I should sell. Eggs? Easy, we have plenty of chickens and when there is an excess, we can let people know. Produce? Maybe not as easy but if the garden is successfully producing and we happen to have extra, we can try to sell it. But the market for homemade soaps is actually incredibly saturated with many people thinking the same thing we are. I put off taking the plunge and ordering the materials for months before I finally just did it. It is scary to think about taking the risk and then having no interest in my products.
In another blog, I talk about our desire to create less waste and some of the other ways we are transitioning a few of our daily items away from store bought ones. Making our own soap was one of those ideas. My plan is to make my own cold-process body and hand soap, dish soap, and shampoo. I like the idea of controlling the ingredients, ditching the plastic bottles, and being able to gift handmade items for special occasions and holidays.
There are tons and tons of soap recipes out there. I did so much research on cold-process soap making that it really seems silly to have been so scared to start. While the ingredients may be expensive up-front, the benefit of making something myself seemed worth it. I found Bramble Berry particularly helpful when researching my soaps and used their lye/fragrance calculator to formulate my first recipe. I ordered a majority of my materials from their site to start my soap making journey. I have also ordered some of their melt and pour bases and really like that they are local to Washington.
Since this is my first attempt at making soap, I used a relatively basic foundation recommended by Bramble Berry which uses a coconut oil, olive oil, and palm oil base. I understand the controversy surrounding palm oils and their sustainability, but as a beginner I wasn’t sure I was ready to play around with the recipe too much. In my first batches of soap, I am using palm oil and beef tallow as a comparable palm oil substitute.
Before diving into soap making, it's essential to research your state’s business laws if you plan to sell your soaps. In the state of Washington, a business does not need a cosmetic or drug license to sell soaps as long as they follow the appropriate process for saponification and are only for the purpose of ‘cleansing the human body’. For this reason, none of the soaps sold through my business will make any claims to be moisturizing or do any particular thing for the skin beyond cleanse. I have been researching the ingredients and will be creating them based off of what I would like out of a soap with goals to continue making them as natural as possible.
Making the Soap
Before beginning, we laid out all of the materials that we would need for our batch of soap. Since I am nine months pregnant, my husband handled everything that involved the lye mixture. If you plan to make your own soaps, ensure that you follow proper safety measures including long sleeves, gloves, safety glasses, and proper ventilation. We opened the kitchen window and mixed the lye in the sink. Additional cautions when handling lye include making sure you are adding the lye to the water versus water to lye and being careful when handling the vessel you mix in, as it gets extremely hot.
Melting the oils went fairly quickly and we spent a majority of the afternoon checking the temperature of the lye mixture. It took a very long time for it to reach the recommended 80-90 degrees and we had to reheat the oils so that the two mixtures would be within 10 degrees of each other.
Once mixed, we poured the soap mix into a loaf mold. I am using 47-ounce molds to start out so that I do not end up with excess product that I potentially cannot sell. Plus, this smaller scale inventory means that my house is not being overrun by both baby items and business products. I let the first loaf sit in the mold for a day before taking it out (going forward I plan to leave it for an extra day to see if the edges harden a little more). After sitting an additional day out of the mold, I measured and cut the loaf into bars before allowing it to sit one more day. On day three, I used a spoon to bevel the edges for a cleaner look. Since this was my first ever batch, I will play around with methods for adding designs to the tops and making cleaner edges as I go.
Now we wait for the 4 to 6 week cure period and my soaps will be ready to start shipping!
