Tag Archive | castile soap

Homemade Soap

Following on my previous post on soapmaking, here is a selection of some of the homemade soap that I’ve made.

How to Make Soap Homemade Soap

I usually make goats milk soap, because I LOVE goats milk soap. It’s moisturizing like you wouldn’t believe, hydrating, great for both skin and hair. Plus, it helps a great deal with certain skin problems like eczemas, rashes or sensitive skin.

But in this photo above is the only water soap that I’ve made. As you can see, unlike goats milk soap, water soaps can come out light in colour (depending on the oils used). Goats milk soap always comes out yellow, tan or brown because the sugars in the milk caramelize during the soapmaking process.

The ingredients of the soap pictured above are: olive oil pomace (I always use olive oil pomace, because it’s cheaper), coconut oil and a few drops of castor oil, lye, water and rosemary essential oil.

Soapmaking Handmade Soap

This is the very first homemade soap that I made in my latest soapmaking venture. I used to make homemade soap years ago, when I lived in Barcelona. But I hadn’t done that in years.

This soap is the one all my friends are crazy about, and is the one most in demand in my circle of friends and acquaintances. The ingredients are: olive oil pomace, coconut oil, castor oil, lye, goats milk and rosemary and mint essential oils.

Homemade Soap Charcoal Soap

This curious little soap was my attempt to make homemade charcoal soap using…… homemade activated charcoal!

Activated charcoal is supposed to have multiple benefits. It’s good for acne, helps to regulate oil production in your face, exfoliates…… Usually people buy activated charcoal. But it’s pretty pricey for an ingredient you’re only going to use just once in just one of your homemade soaps. So I thought I’d try making my own.

Activated charcoal is called activated when it comes from plant sources. Well, I figured, plant sources are fairly abundant. In fact, I happened to have a huge stalk full of thick leek leaves that were too old and thick to use as food. So I cut them into large chunks and stuck them into a glass baking pan in the oven. I baked them until they charred and turned to charcoal. Then I took them out (when they got cold, of course) and pounded them in a mortar into fine charcoal powder.

And that is what I dumped into the above soap. I added it to the soap after it was already cooked, using the hot process soapmaking process I detailed in my previous post.

Thus, the ingredients of the above soap are: olive oil pomace (I use a lot of olive oil because I live in Spain the land of olive oil), coconut oil, goats milk, lye, activated charcoal made from leek leaves and rosemary essential oil.

These are 2 soaps in moulds.

These 2 chunks are 2 samples of the homemade soap I’d originally made in Barcelona years ago. As you can see, they’ve darkened quite a bit over the years. But they are still in perfectly good shape and perfectly usable.

I’m not too sure what ingredients they have, because I made them years ago, but I do recall that they are goats milk soap.

Homemade Coconut Oil Soap

These peculiar lumps are some of my fave soaps, next to my signature olive oil soap (second picture above). I absolutely LOOOVEEE LOVE LOVE this homemade soap for my hair. They are THE most moisturizing, yet at the same time, they leave my hair clean and grease free, so I can go more days without washing my hair.

This is a pure coconut oil soap, so the ingredients are simple: coconut oil, lye, goats milk and rosemary essential oil. I add rosemary essential oil to every soap that I make to prevent the oils from going rancid.

Homemade Soap Olive Oil Soap

This is a chunk of my and my friends’ favourite homemade soap. It’s from the batch of olive oil soap. I kept this for my own use and gave the others, which had a more regular rectangular shape, away.

So now you have seen a sampling of some of the soaps I’VE made, how do you feel about making your own soaps? You can find step by step instructions on how to make soap in my previous post, Soapmaking.

And if you love relaxing with a good book at the end of your day, I’ve written a few thrillers so, if you’re into creepy, scary, suspenseful novels, I’d love it if you’d check them out here: Thrillers by Moi.

Have you made some homemade soap of your own? Or maybe you’ve got some questions. Do leave me comments at the end, I LURRRVE to receive (positive, non-spammy) comments!

If you enjoyed this post (I really hope you do!), maybe you will also like:

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Castile Soap and Coconut Milk for Hair

Oct8

I’d read about using castile soap and coconut milk for hair, and I wanted to give it a shot.

I’ve been on a no ‘poo craze for the past few weeks. Now three weeks since I last dropped a drop of conventional, commercial shampoo on my hair and counting.

I’d recently tried shikakai and bentonite clay for washing my hair, you can read about the results here: Shikakai and Bentonite Clay for Hair.

I was very happy with bentonite clay (not so much the shikakai, but you can read about why in this post on shikakai) but, just as people who use ordinary shampoos have a grand variety of hundreds of shampoos to choose from, why couldn’t we no ‘poo-ers also enjoy that luxury? So I wanted to try out new methods.

I’d used natural, handmade shampoo bars before, but they are hard to get where I live and I have to order online from the US. Well, I’m sure natural, handmade soaps are available online from Europe as well, but I wasn’t going to go to the bother of thumping about all over the internet for them. (I know Lush have them, but some of them contain sodium lauryl sulfate which is a chemical we are definitely trying to avoid.)

I could occasionally find some at handicraft or medieval fairs, but those only come by about once a year and then what will you do to get natural handmade shampoo bars in between?

So I turned to castile soap and coconut milk.

Now, I might add that the famous Dr Bronners castile soap is NOT available here in Spain. Or at least not in my city. Perhaps if you live in Madrid you can find it, you can get anything in Madrid.

But I live several hours away from Madrid, so going shopping there is not an option for me.

However, I could easily get a hold of natural soap bars, castile soap bars. Local housewives here make them with olive oil and sell them to local drugstores for a very low price.

And Jabón Lagarto, another natural choice for those of us who live in Spain (although it’s made from beef tallow so vegetarians might want to avoid it), can be obtained for literally pennies (or, well, cents) at any bazaar or supermarket.

So I decided to melt Jabón Lagarto (but it could have worked just as well with the local handmade olive oil soaps—which, when you come right down to it, is indeed the original pure olive oil soap that gives its name to castile soap (Castile being a region in Spain)) in hot water.

I chose Jabón Lagarto because it is available in soap flakes, whereas if I were to use a bar of local handmade all-natural castile soap, I would have had to grate it by hand, since I don’t own a food processor.

I used a proportion of one cup of soap flakes to one cup of hot water. That turned out to be too much, since it’s a strong soap, and next time I will use only ½ a cup of soap flakes to 4 cups of liquid (taking into account that coconut milk is a liquid too).

When you use too much soap, the resulting liquid soap is not liquid! It’s solid. Hence the need for the right proportion of soap flakes. But if you use too much, just add more liquid.

I boiled 2 cups of water on the stove. Then I poured in the soap flakes and stirred and stirred and stirred. I took the water off the stove, but the soap didn’t melt and in the end I had to leave it simmering on the stove on low heat.

When all the soap had melted, I poured in a can of coconut milk. The can contained 2 cups of coconut milk, thus making a total of 4 cups of water and 1 cup of soap flakes. When it cooled down, it was solid, and I needed to pour in 3 more cups of water to get it to the consistency that I wanted. Hence, the correct proportion, at least for my soap, was ½ cup of soap to 4 cups of liquid.

The original mixture was a semi-transparent pale yellow liquid, sort of like thick apple juice. But with the addition of the coconut milk, when it dried it turned into a thick white liquidy thing.

I poured it into empty shampoo bottles that we happened to have lying around.

You can also add in a few drops of oil or essential oils for added benefits and fragrance. I’m too lazy to do that haha.

However, you can read up on a few of the natural, plant-based oils that I use in skin care in this post:

Last night I washed my hair—just my scalp, not the length—with a few drops of this natural liquid soap. And the results?

Hair Castile Soap Coconut Milk

I love my hair! It’s soft, bouncy, doesn’t feel or look in the least bit greasy and my curls are well defined.

Castile soap with coconut milk is definitely going to form a regular part of my natural, no ‘poo hair care arsenal.

And in addition, I’m now getting my kids to wash their skin and hair with the natural liquid soap that I made, so we get the additional benefit of weaning the whole family off of chemicals.

And while we’re at it, not to sound like a sleazy saleslady but I’ve written a few thrillers so, if you’re into creepy, scary, suspenseful novels, I’d love it if you’d check them out, here: Thrillers by Moi.

So what about you? Have you tried the no ‘poo method yet? Are you also weaning your family off of chemicals? What results have you been getting? Do tell tell! As you know, I LURRVE to receive (positive, non-spammy) comments!

Hair Castile Soap Coconut Milk

If you enjoyed this post (I really hope you do!), maybe you will also like:

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Going No Poo

Aug13

I’ve been on a natural health products craze lately, trying to reduce the amount of chemicals that we use in our life as much as possible. And no poo has been my latest craze.

As you may (or may not, haha) know, no poo means swearing off conventional, commercial, chemical-filled shampoos and using our own homemade ones, or ones made with all natural ingredients, instead.

I’d just hennaed my hair again after about three whole months without doing it. You can see some pics of the results here:

Henna Hair

I was so delighted with the effect of the henna, all of a sudden I was filled with the desire to never use chemicals on those glistening locks again. (The fact that I’d been researching places online to find the purest, highest-quality henna, and discovered some really scrumptious sites that sell luscious Indian herbs as well, didn’t really hurt the cause—even if it was perhaps not the best idea for my pocketbook haha.)

At any rate, if you are in Spain (or anywhere in Europe for that matter—but I am always looking for places with the best shipping rates to Spain in particular, of course), here are two sites that I can recommend. Both carry all types of henna—some of which are pure and some, well, not quite so much—as well as all manner of Indian herbs such as shikakai, amla, neem, aritha……

Bazar Al-Andalus: Carries the most delish and delightful variety of anything Indian or North African you could possibly desire, including natural, vegetarian, LEAD-FREE kohl (it is the works! One day I will write about my experiences with their kohl here on this blog). Not only are they located in Granada, which is only an hour away from my house, it literally took LESS THAN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS from the time I made my order for it to arrive at my doorstep! Is that ultra-fast shipping or what??

Aromazone: A company located in France, which is my number one choice (next to iHerb, but iHerb doesn’t carry all the scrumptious raw ingredients and raw material that Aromazone does) thanks to its incredibly low prices. To give an example, a package of shikakai from this company costs only a fraction of what it does at Bazar Al-Andalus. I haven’t ordered anything from them yet, but I am planning to.

But getting back to the subject at hand, which is: going no poo haha!

As I was saying, I started researching other hair washing methods instead.

My first experiment was with shikakai. You can read about my experiences here: Shikakai: My Recent Experiment.

My next foray into no poo was with bentonite clay, which you can read about here: Bentonite Clay for Hair.

Next up after that is my post on castile soap with coconut milk.

I don’t yet have a regular no poo routine, since I’m still experimenting. Although as I’ve said, I’ve been ‘poo free for about 3 weeks now and still going strong.

So, do I ever plan on going back to conventional, chemical-filled but oh-so-easy-to-find store-bought shampoos again? Well, as long as I’m able to source clay and natural handmade soap, I don’t believe I will.

I’ve also been going chem-free in other areas of life.

I began by changing to all natural soap flakes to wash our clothes instead of regular detergent.

I’d been using soap flakes for years, but then I got to reading consumer reports on laundry detergent, and that only served to pique my curiosity. Now all of a sudden I wanted to try out all those detergents!

However, I wasn’t satisfied with the results of any conventional detergent, not even the ones touted as being the most effective, and which everyone raved about. I found that, no matter which way you looked at it, clothes simply came out cleaner—and with far less product—using simple soap flakes.

So I went back to soap flakes, and I haven’t varied since.

The only thing I haven’t been able to find yet is a natural fabric softener that actually pleases me. Now, I must make clear that when it comes to clothes, I am THE ORIGINAL PRINCESS from The Princess and the Pea.

So needless to say, clothes that come out even the slightest bit cartony, cardboardy, scratchy or stiff just DON’T MAKE THE BILL with me.

I’ve tried apple cider vinegar, regular vinegar, baking soda and any combination of the three to soften clothes. But I’m sorry, it was a no-go for me and I’m still using chemical-filled conventional fabric softeners.

If you’d like more info about going no poo, here’s a website that covers most questions on the subject: The No Poo Method.

So how about you? Have you tried the no poo method? What have your results been? What methods do you use? Do tell tell! As you know, I LURRVE to receive (positive, non-spammy) comments!

Henna Hair