How to Make a Handmade Soap
Wen-Lin Liu
Introduction
Huge amount of edible oil and fat was
use to cook food, such as fried chicken,
fried onion rings, and fried tofu in Chinese
families. However, the used edible oil
and fat can't repeat to cook other food.
It is a terrible disaster to environment if the used oil was discharged to a drain pipe.
It is a very important issue to recycle the waste oil well avoiding to poison the earth.
In this study, sodium hydroxide was used to make edible oil and fat become soap in
a saponification reaction. Unlike the commercial soap, the side reaction product,
glycerin was kept in handmade soap after saponification. The glycerin was the main
component of skin care products (e.g. crème, lotion, and moisturizers)
Beginning the operation of making soaps, the stuff you need is a plastic
(or stainless) box, used edible oil and fat, sodium hydroxide, clean water
(or iced milk), mixer (e.g. stirring rod), and a 250 mL beaker.
Step One: Take 160 mL water (or 160 grams iced milk) into a 250 mL beaker.
Step Two: Take exact 80 grams of sodium hydroxide using an electric scale.
Step Three: Take solid sodium hydroxide into clean water (or iced milk) gently.
Step Four: make the mixture ground slowly, until the solid sodium hydroxide disappears.
Step Five: Take the high concentration sodium hydroxide solution into the 600 mL
edible oil and fat which is stirred gently in a big plastic (or stainless) box.
Step Six: Keep stirring the mixture of sodium hydroxide solution and edible oil carefully
until the mixture become jelly.
Step Seven: Take the jelly mixture into a plastic (or stainless) box and keep them in a clean room.
Step Eight: After one week, you will get a big piece of high quality handmade soap.
Step Nine: Enjoy it~
Notice: The ratio of the sodium hydroxide and oil is very important! Please measure the weight
of them exactly. If you don’t, the soap product will hurt your skin or cannot clean anything.
