Natural handmade soaps: Techniques and recipes

Introduction

MAKING your own soaps using natural ingredients at home is not a difficult task as many people think. While preparing the soap base may require some time before being perfect, natural ingredients to be added to your own soap can be easily found in the enarby store if not in the garden.

This book is meant to offer you a detailed escription of what homemade soap making entails. From the tools needed to the techniques most in use these days, it will help you to get started in preparing soaps that can then be tailored to specific uses depending upon your needs. Herbs will help you in the process, being ingredients that since ancient times have played an important role when it comes with treating various health conditions. Among the herbs that can make your bath more stimulating and tranquilizing are the bergamot, passion flower, sandalwood, marjoram and lavender. I will discuss about those while introducing their essential oils, one of the main ingredient in soap making.

In these days more and more people are shifting from industrially made soaps to hand made ones with the result that herbal (and fruit) soaps are now giving synthetic soaps a tough competition. This change in people’s habits is given by the fact that the chemical additions made in the synthetic soaps could create several side effects on the skin. As amatter of fact, some of these soaps are made with chemicals proved to be harsh on the skin, an element that may evetually increase the sensitivity of your skin if not even make it more prone to allergies.

Using herbal soaps, instead, has been proved to be safe enough for the skin if not even creating positive changes to its appearance and qualities given their content in natural ingredients.

Chapter 1

History of soap making

IT is believed that soap making started as early as 2800 B.C. Archeologists in Mesopotamia came across the first findings about soap when they discovered a cylinder made of clay covered with a material similar to soap. In their reconstruction of the ancient technique of making soaps, they described this discovery as a method involving boiliing fats together with ashes.

Other important sources in the soap making history are found in different medical texts written on papyrus. These books contain information about different types of methods used to make soap in Egypt and other Mediterranean regions. One of these methods was to mix animal fats as well as vegetable oils with alkaline salts. The result was then used for bathing as well as treating skin problems.

Even the Holy Bible itself tells us about how the Israelites combining ashes with vegetable oils were able to make a substance that looked like a hair gel. This substance was used then as soap for bathing and washing.

Later, during the second century A.D., Alexandria, a popular physician, started to commercialize the use of soap by explaining