Jan 263 min read

Gearing Up for Making Soap

Before diving into making your first batch of soap you need to have all the proper tools. Give my blog post on Safety and Soapmaking a quick read to gear up with your PPE and practice safe lye handling.

I am a cold process soap maker. Imagine it as a blend of science and art where you mix oils and lye to create a fabulous bar of soap. The “cold process” part refers to the fact that heat isn’t actively used in the saponification process – the transformation of oils and lye into soap. It’s a bit like a slow dance between ingredients, resulting in a bar that’s gentle on your skin.

Now if you’re trying this as a potential new hobby, you’re not wanting to spend too much at first. Some of these tools you might have at home already, but you need to be willing to sacrifice that tool to soap making only. Once you contaminate your tools with lye, fragrance oil, or any other additives, it’s not good to use those tools again for food. For anything listed here that you don’t own or aren’t willing to sacrifice to the art, I’ll include some Amazon affiliate links so you can get equipped.

You’re going to need PPE which I go into on my Safety and Soapmaking post. So give that a quick read if you haven’t already. If you’re good then here’s a list of all the tools I name over there:

Protective eyewear

Rubber gloves

Long sleeves

Plastic containers for measuring and mixing lye

Plastic or silicone tool for stirring lye solution

Plastic mixing bowl for blending oils and lye in

Flat plastic lid to leave tools on

You’re going to need a way to melt your solid oils and butters. This can be achieved with a double boiler or a crockpot. I use and recommend a crockpot, because if you ever get into hot process soap making then you will need one anyways.

When making soap, we weigh ingredients for recipes. You will need a kitchen scale, I have this one pictured below from Amazon and it’s great. It’s affordable, accurate, and I can weigh in grams or ounces. Another thing you will measure is the temperature of your oils and your lye. You will need a thermometer for this, make sure it’s stainless steel so you can safely stick it in the lye solution.

Your oils and lye can be hand mixed, but you don’t want to, it will take forever. You’re going to want to invest in an immersion blender that’s just for soap making. I found mine on the Facebook marketplace for super cheap, but they’re quite affordable if you buy one brand new. You’ll also want a couple silicone spatulas and whisks on standby to stir in fragrance and scrape out the bowl.

You don’t have to buy expensive molds! In fact, you don’t need to buy molds at all. There’s so much stuff you can use that you likely already have. I made soap not long ago in a Pringles can and I love how it turned out!

You could use milk cartons, yogurt containers, even a cardboard box lined with freezer paper. If you really want to use a mold, you can use shaped silicone molds, or these loaf molds that I use are specifically for soap making.

If you use the loaf mold, you will have to cut your soap after taking it out of the mold. If you wait at least 24 hours before cutting, then you can just use a regular kitchen knife or dough cutter because the saponification phase has ended. All the lye molecules have bonded with oil molecules. I found this loaf mold that comes with a dough cutter on Amazon which is great. The only other thing that I can think of is a few plastic containers for weighing out your fragrance, or mixing many colours of soap batter in. My next few posts will be some beginner soap recipes, what oils and butters would you like to work with?