Handmade Soap - Coffee House Chore Soap

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Have you ever made your own soap? Maybe it's time for you to give it a try.

I developed skin allergy for surfactant (aka hand soap, detergent, dish soap, you name it) over the years, that I had to wear rubber gloves to do basically any chore in the house. Recently, I started trying to make my own soap to eliminate contact to allergen. I stumbled across this "house chore soap" concept from Chinese/Taiwanese websites, and they are AMAZING!

These days, these house chore soaps are the only ones we use to do dishes, clean kitchen, stove etc. They work even better than the commercial ones! S always exclaimed, why would these soaps not be more popular? We don't know...but I hope you'd give it a try.

The basic soap making procedure can be found pretty much everywhere on YouTube. The key is to ensure safety and have quality ingredients (not that you need organic certified etc, but more importantly, they need to be free of impurities). When it comes to chemical reactions, the little atoms don't care much about whether the olives had access to natural fertilizers or synthetic fertilizers (just an example), but the leftover chemicals in the olive oil could potentially make a difference in the reaction. In fact, when it comes to purity, it's most important to get good quality lye and pure oil (not blended ones). This ensures the reaction would go as planned and you don't end up with nasty surprises (and given lye is sodium hydroxide, one of the most corrosive chemicals, surprises should be minimized).

I hope you're a little scared, but still curious enough to explore further at this point. Because, if you take the right precautions, it's really not bad at all! In fact, there are so many things you can play with, it's a lot of fun!

Here's the recipe:

House Chore Soap (batch 2016-10-23)

Oil phase: 70% coconut oil (unfractioned), 15% palm oil, 10% peanut oil, 5% olive oil
superfat 3%

Water phase: brewed coffee (room temperature)
  1. Watch YouTube videos on how to make soap. 
  2. Plug the oil phase parameters into SoapCal (soap calculator) to obtain the right quantity for your batch size
  3. Make soap according to instruction
  4. Wait minimum of 4 weeks before using the soap (it will make the soap last much longer, the chemical reaction was done long ago)

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