How To Make Liquid Hand Soap
Making your own hand soap is beautifully simple. Today we will focus on using essential oils known for their antibacterial effects to create an antibacterial hand soap. Create your own handwash today from our simple recipe without breaking the bank!
Ingredients
Optional
- An electric mixer - its quite easy to mix this by hand, but you may find a mixer useful.
- Salt solution - you can use a salt solution to thicken the finished product if you want to. Make it by dissolving 20g of salt into 100ml of water
Method
Empty your liquid soap base into a jug ready for mixing - its much easier to pour back into a bottle from a jug than a bowl!
Measure out your essential oil. Keep it to a maximum level of 0.5%* of the soap, which is 5ml of essential oil to 1 litre of soap. Measure out half a teaspoon each of thyme essential oil and tea tree oil, and slowly mix it into your soap base. Alternatively, use an accurate scale to measure out a combined total of 5g essential oil.
Once fully blended, add a few drops of salt solution (if using) and continue to mix while monitoring the thickness. Add more if required.
Pour back into the bottle! You're done!
Additional info
We've used thyme and tea tree essential oils because they are known for their effective antibacterial effects. Clove bud and eucalyptus essential oils can also be used to similar effect.
However, you can also use citrus essential oils like bergamot, grapefruit and lime or floral essential oils like rose geranium and ylang ylang to create amazing scented soap.
*We used 0.5% essential oil content because that is the recommended amount from the soap base manufacturer. However, that makes a very mildly scented liquid soap. We have tested this recipe up to 1% essential oil content and haven't noticed any stability problems. Our advice is to try 0.5% initially, leave it for a few hours for the fragrance to settle and if you would like a stronger scent, then mix some more essential oil in.
