Making Liquid Hand Soap

The other day I decided to try my hand at another frugal activity, namely the making of some liquid hand soap.  Having just ordered a bottle of organic hand soap from an online store and paying £3 for it, I decided that there must be a cheaper way to wash my hands at the kitchen sink, so I decided to have a pootle around YouTube for some inspiration.

I came across lots of videos that demonstrated how to make liquid hand soap very simply and easily from just one bar of soap.  Most of the videos did use a particular US brand of 'magic' soap, which I happened to have a couple of bars of, as I had bought them as part of my switch to more natural products. The other main ingredient was distilled water, which I also had a couple of bottles of, which I had previously used in my iron, but which were now not needed as my iron had broken.

I fished them out  from the back of the under sink cupboard, and along with the bar of soap I set to work to try it out for myself.

Firstly, I grated the bar of soap, using a regular grater that we use for cheese.  Then I boiled up 2 litres of distilled water in an old enamel casserole dish, and added the grated soap to the water once boiling.  I had to keep the heat on for a while until all of the soap flakes had melted, but once they had, I took it off the heat and left it for at least 12 hours to cool. Apparently, you must leave it untouched or you can spoil the consistency of the resulting soap. Here's a picture of what the soap looked like after it had melted into the water.

And here's a photo of what it looked like the next day.

When I went back to the liquid soap, I was pleased to see that it had thickened up quite considerably. It was a bit lumpy and gloopy, but I took the hand blender to it, as I had seen in the videos, to smooth it out and then decanted some of it into a glass soap dispenser and into glass bottles to keep for future use.  I must admit that even after blending it was still a bit gloopy, but I don't mind too much and was pretty pleased with the results.

This was a very quick and easy process and I wouldn't hesitate to try it again.  I used an almond scented soap on this occasion, as it was the nicer smelling of the two that I had bought.  Apparently, you can also add two tablespoons of vegetable glycerine to this concoction to improve the consistency, but in another video I watched it stated that this wasn't strictly necessary, so I left it out.

Two and a half bottles of liquid hand soap from 1 bar of soap which cost £2.80 and two x 1 litre bottles of distilled water which cost £1 each.  I think that was pretty good value.  I'll let you know how I get on using it and how it keeps.

For anyone interested, perhaps my favourite video pertaining to the use of this liquid soap, was this one whereby you could use it to make 12 different household and beauty products.  The insect repellent, foaming hand soap and the laundry liquid particularly interested me and I may be trying these in the near future.