Basic Equipment for Soap Making

Basic tools and ingredients you'll need to make your own soap bars

• Safety Gear: gloves, glasses, and long sleeves.

• Mixing Bowls preferably stainless steel but plastic PP#5 (polypropylene) can be used too since it's lye and heat resistant. We use these bowls to mix our lye with water and to mix the lye solution with oils.

• Silicone Spatula

• Immersion Blender or Whisk (to reach a trace, the phase when oils and water emulsified, we need to blend the mixture. Using an immersion blender is much faster than using a whisk). Whichever you use, make sure it's for soap making only and do not use it for food preparations.

• A Kitchen Pot to melt hard oils and butters

• Digital Scale to measure ingredients.

• Hard Oils, Butters and Liquid Oils such as coconut oil, cocoa butter, shea butter, olive oil, castor oil, and almond oil. You can make soap with only coconut oil or olive oil, but many recipes will have combinations of two or more types of butters and oils.

• A Thermometer, the use of a thermometer helps us decide which temperature we want to add the lye solution to the oils. If you don't own one, you can wait for the lye solution and oils to cool down to room temperature before mixing.

• Soap Mold, silicone ones are the most common, but you can definitely use alternative options such as used milk cartons. Just cut the upper part of the carton and clean it, pour the soap mixture into the carton and let it sit in the carton for 24-48 hours, then you can cut the carton to release the soap.

• A Cutting Knife - you can use any knife you wish but don't use that knife for food preparation; make it your soap knife. If you want to shape your soap with a cutting knife, you can use a wave knife.

• Sodium Hydroxide NaOH (lye) - I prefer small pellets over flakes since I find them easier to dissolve in the water.