Soap Education

A prevalent thought is that “lye soap” is harsh and thus undesirable.  Probably the most frequently asked question about handmade soap:  “Is there lye in there?” or “Can I get soap without lye?”  The short answer is no.  Soap cannot be made without lye (sodium hydroxide).  However, there is no lye in the finished product.  To understand why there is no lye in the finished product requires a chemistry lesson.  Don’t worry!  The explanation won’t be long and boring like your high school chemistry class. 

Soap is the result of a chemical reaction between lye and oil.  The technical term for this is saponification (yes that is really the term…my husband didn’t believe it when I first told him…from the Latin root sapon=soap).  The lye interacts with the oil to break up the chain of fatty acids and produces byproducts of glycerol (aka glycerin) and fatty acid salts(aka soap).  As long as there is more oil than lye in the reaction, all of the lye will be transformed into glycerol and fatty acid salts.  Voila!  No more lye.

The reason lye soap may have been harsh in the past has been eliminated in modern soap making.  Lye was originally obtained from wood ash, a very impure source.  Without a pure source, calculating how much lye one should put into the oil was quite hit or miss.  In contrast, modern soap makers use industrially processed lye which is 99-100% pure.  Add to that the availability of exact saponification values of oil (ie how much lye does it take to turn this particular oil into soap) and “lye calculators” that tell one exactly how much lye to use for each oil, harsh soap is a thing of the past!

FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)

Why should I buy handmade soap?  There are many reasons, but here are my top few. 

• Handmade soap is actually more gentle to skin that “store bought” soap.  It retains all of the glycerin produced by saponification in addition to moisturizing oils. 
• Handmade soap may contain “exotic” oils that are particularly good for the skin. 
• Some commercially made soap is actually mild detergent.  Many of them have been stripped of glycerin. 
• Few commercially made soaps use only vegetalbe sources of fat. 
• Handmade soap has no artifical preservatives nor does it need them.