How to make soap using lye

Making soap at home requires two types of ingredients — an acid and a base.

Should you use lye to make soap at home?

Many DIY soap recipes call for using lye (the common name for sodium hydroxide) as the base. But lye can be hazardous to work with at home.

Before you begin, here's a quick tutorial about the chemistry behind making soap.

Once you understand how to work with lye and experiment with the ingredients, tools, and equipment that it takes to make soap, you'll have learned a valuable skill.

There are four common methods you can use to make soap: melt and pour, cold process, hot process, and rebatching. Before diving into your first batch of homemade soap, familiarize yourself with the four most common methods of soapmaking. Some of these processes are easier than others. Knowing how each one works will help you decide which tutorials you want to tackle.

The melt and pour process is not soap from scratch. Instead, pre-made soap bases are simply melted and molded, and you don't have to touch any lye.

The cold process and hot process are both techniques for making soap from scratch. The more popular cold process takes longer than the hot process, and the hot process creates more rustic-style soap. Both methods include working with lye.

Rebatching is remaking a bad batch of finished homemade soap. It's a way to save all the ingredients, but it's labor and time-intensive and often results in less aesthetically-pleasin.

This recipe for a handsome, heavenly-scented cold process soap is ideal for a beginner to tackle. From this recipe, you can learn how to use other additives. A base of coconut, canola, castor, sesame oil, Shea, and kokum butter is blended with lime, vetiver, and cedarwood essential oils. The result is a smokey marbled soap with distinctive and deeply masculine scents that you'd find in the most delicious men's colognes. Make a batch for gifting the men in your life.