How to Make Your Own Natural Foaming Hand Soap

They said, once you have been bitten by the DIY bug, you will spend most of your free time browsing the Internet to look for DIY inspirations. That is exactly what happened to me. I was busy looking for my next DIY project when I came upon a very simple recipe for making your own foaming hand soap – this is a type of liquid hand soap contained in a special soap dispenser that converts the soap into a soft foam. In order to produce a foam, the consistency of the hand soap must be thin (meaning it should contain at least 50% water). So if you will buy a foaming hand soap from the supermarket, then you will notice that a 250 – 500ml bottle costs around Php 150 – 300. I consider it expensive for a soap that contains mostly of water. You’re actually paying for the cost of the foaming soap dispenser. What you can do instead is to recycle the foaming soap dispenser and make your own liquid hand soap. It’s cheap, easy and you can customize the scent. All you need is just one important ingredient – liquid castile soap.

Liquid castile soap is a soap made from pure vegetable oil (it’s vegan-friendly) instead of using animal fat (lard). It is a mild liquid soap and has no surfactant (e.g. Sodium Lauryl Sulfate) which is why it is suitable for babies or for anyone with sensitive skin. It is also a very concentrated soap so a little amount goes a long way. In fact, you can dilute it with water just like this DIY.

Ingredients
(Makes one 250ml bottle)

Empty foaming soap dispenser
½ cup Liquid Castile Soap
1 cup Distilled water
1 tsp. Sunflower Oil or Jojoba Oil or Sweet Almond Oil
20 drops of your favorite essential oil (or blend of essential oils)

Instructions

1. Fill your soap dispenser with water. It’s important that we add the water first before the liquid soap. Doing it the other way around will create lots of bubbles when the soap is added first.
2. Add the liquid castile soap into the water. Make sure that there is still about 1-1.5 inch of space from the top of the dispenser after adding the soap, otherwise the foaming mechanism of the dispenser will not work.
3. Add the moisturizing oil and essential oils.
4. Cover the dispenser and shake gently to combine the ingredients together.

Where to buy the materials

• I bought a Safeguard foaming hand soap from the supermarket and just recycle the container.
• Liquid castile soap can be bought from Lazada and ISLAS Aromatics. For this DIY, I specifically used Casa de Lorenzo Unscented Cleansing Castile Soap.
• I bought all of my moisturizing oils from Craftology Essentials.
• I bought the essential oils from GIGA Naturally.

Both the moisturizing oil and essential oil are optional for this DIY recipe. Since I often wash my hands while cooking, I want my hand soap to be non-drying that’s why I added moisturizing oil. On the other hand, if you want to add antibacterial properties to your hand soap, then you just need to add either lavender or tea tree essential oil. The texture of the foam produced by the soap dispenser depends on the ratio between soap and water. The above recipe produces thick foam. If you want the foam to be thinner, then you can reduce the soap into ¼ cup. Also, it’s very important to occasionally shake the soap dispenser as the oils tend to separate from the water over time. Finally, this DIY will save you money because you can make around 4 batches of foaming hand soap with a 250ml of liquid castile soap. Not to mention, liquid castile soap has tons of uses. I already have other DIY projects using liquid castile soap, so watch out for them on my next blog posts J

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links and purchase the products, I’ll receive some commission.