The industrial and chemical-laced soaps you buy from the supermarket can never come close to the benefits of organic homemade soap. Making your own soap is a very rewarding activity, and it’s also great for your body. Here’s how the process works.

It’s actually a lot simpler than you might imagine – soap making is basically about mixing oils or fats and lye together, starting a chemical process called saponification. And that’s basically it. Everything else is in the specifics, for example, the kinds of ingredients you add.

The first thing you start with is choosing a recipe. There are many options available, but there’s always a ratio of different oils that you mix together. Different types of oil produce different results, but a very common, balanced mix is 30% tallow, 25% coconut oil and 45% olive oil.

Then you have to exactly measure the specific amounts of oil and lye that you will use. If you have too much lye, the soap may become irritating and burn your skin. If you have too little, the soap is going to be greasy. So you have to use a cold process measuring chart to get the amounts just right.

After that, you mix lye and water to create a lye solution. Remember that lye is a dangerous chemical and burn your skin so you should take all necessary precautions when working with it, including wearing goggles and rubber gloves.

You’re now ready to mix all the oils together. If they are solid at room temperature, you first melt them until they’re liquid, and then add all the rest. To this mix of oils you add in the lye and stir with a stick blender. You do this until it thickens and reaches “trace”, the stage where all the ingredients have combined.

Add in all the extra ingredients that will stay in the soap unchanged – for example, essential oils, dried flowers, or coloring. Pour the mixture into a mold – the soap at this stage is still caustic and hazardous to your skin. You leave the soap to harden in the mold for about 24 hours, after which you take it out and cut it into the shapes you want.

Now you leave the finished soaps to cure for 4 weeks to make sure it’s completely safe to use them. And then, you’re ready to enjoy your creation, give it as a gift or maybe even sell it.