First batch of homemade soap!

So I've been doing a lot of research lately on making homemade soap.  Have you ever looked at the ingredients on your everyday soap?  Wether it be the soap you use in the shower or the stuff that sits at your kitchen sink.  It's some nasty stuff!!

For example, my husband uses Irish Spring in the shower.  I HATE the smell, but he likes it, so whatever.  But look at the ingredients list...

So I looked up some of the ingredients and if you read down the list you'll see Titanium Dioxide, check out this link...moderate risk of causing cancer and can be dangerous when inhaled...HELLO!! You use it in the shower...where there is a lot of steam...inhaling the fumes it's pretty much inevitable.  The last 6 ingredients on the list are all made in a lab.  And you do realize those are being absorbed into your body through your skin.  Sounds wonderful to me!  (Can you hear the sarcasm??)

This is the ingredients label to the liquid soap I use in the shower.  Not a huge fan of if but I got it for super cheap with a coupon...Olay

I can't even pronounce 98% of those ingredients.  Needless to say, I'm done using that stuff.

Now I'm not a total health freak and everything I eat doesn't have to be organic and all natural or whatever, however, I do pay a lot of attention to the ingredients of things that I put IN my body and ON my body.  And after doing some research about soaps...it just grosses me out, and frankly scares the bageebas out of me!

So...I decided I was going to start making my own soap.  Not only for us to use, but for me to sell.

I spent a couple of weeks researching recipes, techniques and watching a lot of you tube videos.  Finally bought some supplies off of ebay and ordered all my oils and got to work this past Wednesday.  I wasn't to sure how it was going to turn out, but it was a fun process.

To my surprise...so far so good.  I now have 44 bars of homemade soap that are sitting in our spare bedroom curing.  It will be about 3-4 more weeks before they are good to use, but I love they way they look & smell so far.

One batch (22 bars) is just plain/unscented soap.  And the other batch (the speckled one) is Lavender-Rosemary...it smells amazing!!  I can't wait to use that one. 

The unscented soap (right) has palm oil, coconut oil, castor oil & canola oil.  All the oils go through a chemical reaction called saponification when mixed with lye & a liquid.  That is what turns it into soap. If you do the calculations correctly, there will be no more lye left over after the chemical reaction and you should have a 5% overage of oils, which will really help hydrate your skin.  

The lavender-rosemary soap has olive oil, coconut oil, palm oil, lavender essential oil, rosemary essential oil & some ground up dried rosemary.  Then the same saponification process. 

Those ingredient lists are a lot more appealing to me that the ones off the body soaps that we have been using.

I've got some other recipes that I'm going to make and can't wait to see how those turn out too.  Our little town has a great farmers market in the summertime, so along with all the veggies that I'll be selling out of our garden...I'll also have soap for sale.