Easy Homemade Castile Soap at Home.
You can choose any oil you like as material to DIY handmade soap.
Give your soap any scent you like.
Let’s dive right in.
Castile soap is biodegradable from olive oil, water, and lye. Originally from the Castile region of Spain, this mild soap has been used for hundreds of years for body and hair cleansing, laundry, and floor washing.
In life, you can use solid castile soap; or mix soap and water to make soap liquid.
Pros of DIY Castile Soap: Simple, small, eco-friendly, powerful in detergency, pour into cute shapes in any mold you like.
Read the simple steps below, and you can learn to make your castile soap.
Tools and Materials for Making Castile Soap
cold pressing
Note: The bowls, measuring tools, and other tools will have soap residue, so it’s best to use them only for soap-making, not food preparation.
Whether you are making it for the first time or not, to be safe, please read the following safety instructions:
Olive oil soap is one of the mildest and most classic soap recipes. This recipe will show you how to make it from scratch using the cold process soap method in just 5 steps, and it can save you a lot of money.
Note: This castile soap recipe must sit in the mold to set, normally at least 48 hours, or up to 4 days if Sodium Oleate is not used. Here you can read more about Sodium Oleate.
On its own, olive oil makes a great hard bar that’s sensitive and nourishing without over-drying your skin. It has a unique foam; while I call it creamy, you’ll hear others call it gooey.
It doesn’t have the big fluffy bubbles that coconut oil or castor oil can create, but honestly, I love it. No other soap is as mild as a bar made with extra virgin olive oil. It is also a great soap for sensitive skin and babies.
The low cost of homemade castile soap means you can get a lot of castile soap for a fraction of the money.
Not really. You can technically use any oil to make soap when making your castile soap, but each oil has different soap-making properties. Coconut produces stiff bars with a fluffy foam, sunflower oil produces softer conditioning bars, and castor oil helps stabilize the foam.
However, few single oils make a very good soap, which is why many recipes require a mix of many different oils. Too much coconut oil and your soap bars may dry out; too much castor oil may be sticky.
Pure castile soap is made entirely from olive oil, but many people make soap by mixing several oils to create a soap with balanced properties. Pure olive oil soap doesn’t create much lather and is soft and slippery to the touch.
Won’t. It’s just to add fragrance to handmade soaps. To add fragrance to your soap, you will need 10 drops of your favorite essential oil. You can use more than 1 essential oil, but the total is 10 drops. You can increase the amount of oil used; for a lighter flavor, you can reduce the amount to 5 to 7 drops.
Common essential oils are Peppermint, Orange, Lemon or Grapefruit, Lavender, Rose, Vetiver, Pine, Sandalwood, and Bergamot.
Whether or not homemade castile soap requires preservatives is a matter of debate. I don’t use one because the pH of soap is high enough that it’s not a favorable environment for the growth of most of the microorganisms we’re trying to avoid.
However, if I were to sell a liquid soap, I would do a proper microbiological test on the liquid soap to see if it needed a preservative. In any case, most natural preservatives on the market are ineffective at the high pH of soap.
You can buy molds online or at craft stores.
If you think buying molds is a hassle, look for a hard box, such as an old wine or shoe box, to transform into a suitable soap mold.
You can also make soap molds from wooden boards or use your wooden box as a soap mold.
If lye is accidentally spilled on the table during use, neutralize it with white vinegar and avoid touching it with your hands.
If you accidentally touch the lye, call the local emergency number immediately!
You first want to confirm that all steps are performed sequentially.
Secondly, the proportion of ingredients is not too much or too little, and it needs to be the same as the material mentioned above proportions.
Another key point is that the oil and lye must be mixed at the same temperature. Otherwise, the saponification reaction cannot occur.
This castile soap recipe must sit in the mold for at least 48 hours or up to 4 days if sodium lactate is not used. If it’s a matter of time, be patient while your castile soap takes shape.
Tongyu Zhu, Wanli Kang, Hongbin Yang, Zhe Li, Bobo Zhou, Yingqi He, Jiaqi Wang, Saule Aidarova, Bauyrzhan Sarsenbekuly, Advances of microemulsion and its applications for improved oil recovery, Advances in Colloid and Interface Science, 10.1016/j.cis.2021.102527, 299, (102527), (2022).
Van Duong T, Ni Z, Taylor LS. Phase Behavior and Crystallization Kinetics of a Poorly Water-Soluble Weakly Basic Drug as a Function of Supersaturation and Media Composition. Mol Pharm. 2022 Apr 4;19(4):1146-1159. doi: 10.1021/acs.molpharmaceut.1c00927. Epub 2022 Mar 23. PMID: 35319221.