DIY Homemade Natural & Eco Chic Soap
December 11, 2008 by Jennifer
Today we have a special DIY homemade eco chic soap guest post from Anne-Marie, founder of Bramble Berry Inc.…
More and more families are growing increasingly concerned about their ecological footprint. In addition to taking less trips, recycling and planting more trees, there is an easy thing you can to help save the environment, improve your family’s health and save money in the process. Making your own soap is a great way to control the ingredients that go into your bath tub, onto your child and down your drain. And, bonus! It’s a fraction of the cost of store bought soap.
Eco Chic soap is the next big thing in personal care. What is Eco Chic soap? This category of personal care is all about creating yourself, controlling the ingredients and reusing common household goods. Rather than throwing away single use plastic containers, give them a new lease on life and use them as soap molds.
Making soap is an ideal creative outlet for the entire family. When you make your own soap, you choose the ingredients so you can use all natural colorants (like cocoa powder or charcoal) to color your soap and all natural essential oils to fragrance it, creating a soap bar that is naturally derived and cleans effectively.
Here’s an easy recipe to follow (hint: it’s perfect to make with children ages 4 and up with parental supervision):
You’ll need:
- Herbs, oatmeal, coffee, spirulina, clay, or food-grade charcoal
- 1 pound (16 ounces)Bramble Berry melt and pour soap, organic base
- 1 ounce essential oil (we used lavender, orange and eucalyptus)
- “Soap mold” (a clean, used plastic food dish, like an empty yogurt
- container)
- Rubbing Alcohol
How to make your soap:
1. Prep your herbs and make sure they are the right size for exfoliating gently. Sharp herbs may be too abrasive on the skin. I love using charcoal. It helps to remove toxins and impurities, similar to clay. Plus, it gives the soap a nice black hue.
2. Cut the organic melt and pour blocks into 1 x 1″ cubes.
3. Melt the soap in 30-second increments until the soap is fully melted.
4. Add .25 ounces to .50 ounces of essential oil. Remember, if you use a yellow or orange colored fragrance, your soap base will look less clear and look more yellow/orange.
5. Mix in your herbs or additives. Stir until the herbs seem mostly suspended.
6. Pour your scented and herb’ed soap into the make-shift mold
7. Tip: Don’t fill your make-shift soap mold all the way up. It helps for easy release to fill 85% of the way to the top and not the entire way.
8. Do one finishing touch of rubbing alcohol to finish off your soap and give it a nice smooth surface
Last steps: Wait for the soap to harden, get the soap out, wrap with saran wrap, label and enjoy the compliments you get on your innovative way to help save the earth, improve your household’s carbon footprint and help save the family budget this holiday season.
For more information on how to make your own soap, head to www.soapqueen.com and to buy supplies, including essential oils and the organic soap base, go to www.brambleberry.com
Some of the lovely soaps you can learn to make:
Coffee soap
Layer soap
Spirulina soap
A word from Jennifer:
First off, thanks so much to Anne-Marie for the excellent post. This is a fun holiday gift idea for sure, especially because everyone loves a good eco soap. Secondly, I visited the Bramble Berry site, and it’s amazing – well worth a visit (a long one). Not only do they carry everything you need to make delicious eco-friendly soaps, but they offer loads of tips and recipe ideas as well. This is not just a shop site, but an excellent resource if eco chic soap is your thing (of course it is!).
If you need a merry holiday reason to visit – check out this adorable Christmas tree centerpiece made of soap!
Learn about how to make this and many other beautiful soap creations at Bramble Berry.
I read your posts quite often and consider myself a supporter of sustainable, humane, and green causes. That is why I was surprised to read that you were recommending the Bramble Berry soap company to purchase the soap base from in your DIY eco soap post. I went to their website and read the ingredients in the soap base and they were not completely eco, green or healthy. In fact, certain properties in their base such as sodium laurel sulfate is exactly what someone trying to making healthier choices in hair and body products should AVOID. Did I misunderstand what I read?
Rather than supporting a company that continues to use similar ingredients as used by companies like Procter and Gamble why not recommend a true eco soap be purchased at your local co-op or from an etsy seller of organic soaps, where all of the ingredients are eco, natural and safe.
I looked at all the soap melts at their site before I posted this – which by the way I didn’t write – this is a guest post. Some bases have sulfate, and some don’t. You can choose a more natural base if you like. In soap recipes on this site, I’ve even listed borox because if you’re making soap such as this you need some sort of surfactant. There are soaps that need a surfactant quality and some that don’t but it depends on the time and supplies you have on hand. Many of the recipes on this site have no unnatural ingredients what-so-ever, but there are different level of green readers who read this blog.
I posted this guest post because it allows folks to start working with making their own soaps using items of their choosing. You never need to follow a recipe exactly – but for someone who has never done this, this is a good safe recipe to start with especially if you visit the site and choose a base you’re comfortable with – or of course you can always grab a base elsewhere but most do have some sort of surfactant. The other bonus of listing this post, over store bought is that people like DIY and you’re cutting down on packaging if you make beauty care items yourself. Also, on this blog and many of my others, I support Etsy and other handmade product crafters all the time, just not in this post.
@Homegrown Healthy PS I looked at your site, very cool. I don’t usually look at the gardening Etsy sites being that I don’t do too many garden posts. I’ll try to post it come spring, well, or sooner for seed starters.
If you really want people to do something green, how about having them create soap homemade that is really homemade? It seems that this would be geared towards someone who is more interested in crafts than someone who is interested in green, environmentally friendly matters. Really, all you’re doing is taking premade soap and making designs out of it.
A better way to make premade soap that is eco-friendly that doesn’t involve the chemical processes involved in soap making would be to suggest that someone take all the leftover bits of soap lying around the house and to melt them all together and make a new bar of soap using the same process you suggested.
Honestly, though, if you care about what goes in you and your family’s soap, you should probably learn how to actually make the soap yourself. Choose your oils and fats carefully, and go from there.
@Marty there have been plenty of posts here about homemade soaps and beauty products of all sorts, even posts about using the leftover soap bits you mentioned. This is just one other option – all kinds of people stop by here, so I try to offer different shades of green ideas and projects.
…love, love, love this post!!! I definitely going to try this!