Soap Recipes
Making soap is one of my all-time favourite things to do. It's like a wee bit of art you can wash with! Get ready to dive into a world of wonderfully sudsy scents, colours, oils, and shapes.Can I make soap without lye?
There’s no such thing as making soap without lye, and here’s why.
As a vegetarian I feel very strongly about using beef tallow and lard in my soaps. Here’s why.
How do I make soap?
Here’s my most thorough overview of how to make your own bar soap.
Exfoliating Creamy Cleansing Balm
I’ve had a few requests for a facial cleanser that’s creamy, yet exfoliating, and here’s what I’ve come up with. It’s thick, creamy, scrubby, and sudsy, and smells awesome to boot—an exfoliating creamy cleansing balm! I no longer recommend using alkaline cleansers...
Egyptian Magic Liquid Soap
This quick-to-assemble Egyptian Magic liquid soap mixes all the best parts of Egyptian Magic with a gentle liquid soap base to make for a bee-riffic honey kissed hand soap. Egyptian Magic is made from just six ingredients—olive oil, beeswax, pollen, honey, propolis,...
Lavender Vanilla Soap
This pretty speckled, swirl-topped soap smells of soft lavender and vanilla. It brings to mind warm, dry summer days in Provence (in my imagination, at least). I can see pretty pastel-painted wooden furniture, bundles of lavender hanging to dry in the window, and a...
Über Anti-Acne Soap
After years of DIYing, I’ve got a pretty good cache of acne-fighting ingredients. From clays to herbs to essential oils, my basement cupboards are a veritable arsenal of zit-busting weaponry, and these bars of soap have it all. They’re designed to clobber zits and...
Winter Solstice Soap
Here in Calgary, December 21 is a short, dark day. The sun rises at 8:37AM and sets at 4:32PM, giving us a whopping seven hours, fifty-four minutes, and seventeen seconds with which to go about our daylight requiring business. That's less than half the daylight we...
Cranberry Sauce Soap
I bought a bag of bright red cranberry seeds last year, and found them in the back of my cupboard just in time to make a Cranberry Sauce soap as my second Christmas soap for 2014. These pretty reddish bars are bright and spicy, and feature a sprinkling of pretty...
Blizzard Soap
This crisp, clean white bar smells of cold air and cool mint, and is just perfect for winter. It's my first Christmas soap for 2014, and I'm not quite sure how it's Christmas soaping season already. This soap gets its whiteness from a combination of ...
Egyptian Magic Cleansing Balm
After falling madly in love with my gentle cleansing balm, I just had to keep playing with the idea. Sabine mentioned that she liked to wash her face with my DIY Egyptian Magic, and that sounded like the perfect place to start playing. Cleansing balm + Egyptian Magic...
Pumpkin Pie Soap
Pumpkin pie is easily one of the best things about autumn. Americans seem to have really taken this to heart as the array of pumpkin pie flavoured and scented things available in October and November south of the border is truly shocking. From bagels to lattés to...
Aloe Vera Citrus Soap
This pretty yellow and green soap smells of fresh citrus, suds up beautifully, and leaves your skin clean and happy. The colours come from some bright orange buriti oil (for the yellow), and a touch of green chromium oxide. Buriti oil can be a bit hard to find, so you...
Green Tea & Silk Soap
Annie was the first person who suggested silk soap to me, and it was like a thunderclap. I immediately wondered what rock I'd been living under for the past few years as it is such a brilliant idea (thanks, Annie!). So, silk soap has been on my to-do list ever since...
Lemon Meringue Whipped Soap
This luxurious lemon meringue whipped soap takes inspiration from one of my favourite desserts—lemon meringue pie. With its bright lemony scent, faint yellow hue, and decadent whipped texture, it's lovely in a wee dish by your sink for hand washing and impressing...
Cocoa Peppermint Whipped Cream Soap
I've promised you a whipped soap recipe that doesn't use stearic acid to stabilize it, and here it is. This one uses raw , imparting a delicious chocolatey scent along the way. It's still wonderfully light and airy, but it does end up with a...
Silk & Cedar Liquid Shampoo
I am so excited about this wonderful Silk & Cedar liquid shampoo. It's loaded with all kinds of goodies for your hair, and once you've got your liquid soap paste softened, it comes to together in just a few moments. If you prefer liquid shampoo over shampoo bars,...
Gentle Facial Cleansing Balm
I am so very thrilled with this gentle facial cleanser, and I think you will be, too. It's thick and creamy, and works into a gentle lather as you massage it into damp skin. It rinses away easily, leaving your face clean and smooth, but not overly dry. And, unlike...
Pooch ‘Poo (Dog Shampoo)
I remember trips to the cottage as a kid with Brin, our first family dog. Like Tobyn, he was a Bernese Mountain Dog, complete with a heavy black coat of beautiful fur. He wasn't much for swimming, but he enjoyed wading about near shore, lapping at the water and...
Citrus Chamomile Liquid Shampoo
This request came to me from Kylee, who uses a similar one by Avalon Organics for her dreads. She says "this shampoo has the ability to clarify, which is what I need, and the aloe and citrus work wonders on cleaning/tightening dreads." The ingredient list for the...
Labdanum & Fir Whipped Soap
I'm super excited to present my very first whipped soap recipe—Labdanum & Fir Whipped Soap! The road to this recipe was paved with lots of brainstorming, many experiments, and a fistful of earplugs to prevent hearing loss from very dedicated use of my electric...
DIY Whipped Soap Base
Once I found out about cream soap (and specifically whipped cream soap), I immediately wanted to make some, so I googled it to find out what it was, and how to make it. And it turns out it's a "secret". As in you have to join a specific Yahoo group and are then...
Low Tide Soap
I am thoroughly smitten with these pretty, seaside inspired low tide soap bars. With their dusty turquoise tone, deep green seaweed seam, and sparkling coarse salt topping, they're just beautiful. These soaps are scented using both essential oils and seaweed powder....
Shea Butter & Vanilla Body Wash
One of the first recipe requests I got was from Zil, looking for a DIY dupe for a Dove Shea Vanilla Body Wash. She was working through her drawers and shower, slowly finishing off bottles of store bought stuff and replacing it with natural DIY alternatives. This body...
Lavender & Bergamot Soap
I may have a lavender problem. At last count, I had six different types of lavender essential oil in my cupboard (though in my defense, New Directions had a lavender sale last year). Anyhow, that surplus got me thinking about all the different things I could do with...
Dead Sea Soap
Dead sea mud was one of the first DIY ingredients I ever bought. I mean, it just sounds so exotic and amazing, and it doesn't hurt that the reviews rave about how it leaves skin firm and happy. It turns out, however, that there are only so many things you can add mud...
Liquid Peppermint Hand Soap
After finally getting around to publishing a basic overview on liquid soap, I thought I'd kick off my new litany of liquid soap inspired recipes with a simple peppermint hand soap. This is the type of soap you can pop in a pump-top bottle and use to wash your hands,...
