Simple Homemade Glycerin Soap

It's easy to make soap bars with soap crafter's melt and pour glycerin soap base that you can purchase at almost any craft store. You can use items like clean dry yogurt cups, juice boxes, cream cheese containers, etc. as the molds. Add your favorite essential oil, strength as desired, for scent too. One pound of glycerin base will yield about 5 bars of soap if you are pouring 3 ounces of melted glycerin base into each mold.

Materials:

• molds
• vegetable oil
• 1 lb. glycerin soap base, cut into 1/2 inch pieces
• double boiler or your own double boiler system
• metal spoon
• essential oil, if desired
• rubbing alcohol in a spray bottle

Instructions:

1. Very lightly oil the inside of molds with vegetable oil.
2. Place glycerin soap pieces into double boiler and very slowly melt while slowly stirring over medium to medium high heat. Do not overheat!
3. Once glycerin is melted, remove from heat. Slowly stir in essential oil if desired and pour into molds. If there are bubbles in the soap, allow the bubbles to rise to the surface of the molds and very lightly spray with the rubbing alcohol.
4. Set molds aside for about a half hour and then place molds in freezer for about an hour.
5. Remove from freezer, gently press on the sides of the molds to loosen the soap and then press the bottom of the molds to release the soap.
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6. Wrap each soap bar in plastic wrap and store in a cool dry place until ready to use.

Of course, you'll want to place one of them out right away to use so don't bother wrapping that one ;-)

Source: Trial and error and a combination of recipes.

Editor's Note: A previous version of this post stated that these are "no lye soap bars." This is inaccurate because the initial soap base (and all soaps) were made initially with lye. The chemical reaction of sodium hydroxide (lye) and fat (saponification) creates the soap base and byproducts like glycerin. All the lye is converted into something else and is no longer dangerous to work with.