Kind of, but there are better options.
Using a shop bought liquid soap like Dr. Bronner’s in place of liquid soap paste you make yourself is sort of like using a store bought cake instead of baking your own. You have no control over the ingredients, or how it was baked. You can decorate it however you like, but you can’t change the core ingredients, and you can’t change the dilution level. So, this will really only work for projects where we’d be diluting the liquid soap paste to the same consistency as the liquid soap you have on hand—soap paste based cleansing balms and recipes that call for a cream soap paste are out of the question. If you are using pre-diluted liquid soap in a recipe that calls for liquid soap paste, eliminate the soaking step and do not add any extra water.
A better option is to use a purchased liquid soap paste. Brambleberry has one that looks great (their high sudsing one also looks great!), and it’s much more cost effective than Dr. Bronner’s. You get 2lbs (0.9kg) of undiluted paste for the same price as 2lbs of pre-diluted Dr. Bronner’s. According to Brambleberry, 2lbs of liquid soap paste can make 7–8lbs of diluted soap, so that means you’d get up to 4x as much liquid soap out of that paste, meaning it’s a quarter of the cost! And, since it’s still a paste, you can use it in any recipes that call for liquid soap paste that don’t include dilution. You still cannot use it for recipes that call for cream soap paste as that is an entirely different thing (sort of like pancakes vs. Devil’s food cake… both have “cake” in the name and use flour, but after that the process and ingredients vary quite a lot!).
Posted in: Soap
