Turn A Bar of Soap Into Liquid Hand Soap

How to turn a bar of soap into liquid hand soap

I have a confession to make. I don’t like bar soap. It gets dirty and takes a long time to use up, so I usually get fed up with it and throw it in the trash.

Despite this, people seem to like to give me bar soap, which I feel guilty not using. So I have been buying liquid hand soap at $3 a bottle and putting the bar soap in a box with the intention of somehow finding a use for it.

Then it occurred to me that I might be able to convert the bar soap into liquid hand soap. Why didn’t I think of it before? I did some research and found out that it is easy to do. All it takes is melting the soap with water, adding a little vegetable glycerin, and voilà, you have made liquid hand soap.

So I tried it and was thrilled to find that it works great! From one bar of soap, I made close to 2 liters of hand soap, which will last a long time. The only thing I purchased for this project was a $2 bottle of glycerin at my local drug store:



Glycerin is made from plant oils and is commonly used in soaps, shampoos, moisturizers, etc. Since bar soap already has glycerin in it, I tried this experiment both ways, with and without the added glycerin. I found that the below recipe worked fine without the glycerin, except that the soap tended to clump and didn’t have as smooth a texture. It made enough of a difference that I would recommend adding the glycerin, but you can also try the recipe without it, if you wish.



Ingredients:

1 c soap flakes
10 c water
1 Tbs glycerin

Equipment:

Cheese grater
A large pot
Measuring cup and spoons
A spatula for stirring
A soap container with a hand pump
A container to hold excess soap
Funnel

Directions:

First, grate the soap. Get out your cheese grater, grab the soap, and get grating. I found this to be surprisingly easy, although the soap particles tend to float in the air as you grate. You can wear a mask to avoid breathing it in. When you’re done, the soap flakes look like grated Parmesan:



One bar of soap yielded a little over 1.5 cups of flakes. The recipe only uses one cup of soap flakes, so I put the remaining soap in a jar for later use.

In a large pot, combine 1 cup soap flakes, 10 cups water, and 1 Tbs glycerin. Turn on medium-low heat and stir until the soap dissolves. This happens fast, about a minute or two.

Let the soap cool completely, then pour into the containers using the funnel. That’s all there is to it!

As I mentioned, this recipe makes a lot of soap, about 6 bottles worth. I put the excess in a large bottle and am storing it under the sink. When I run out, I will simply pull out the big bottle and funnel some more into the smaller bottle.

You can also use this soap as body wash. To make it smell nice, add a drop or two of essential oil to the mix.

As I mentioned, the only thing I bought for this experiment was the glycerin. I reused the bottles and the soap was a gift. (Alternately, I could have saved soap slivers and made the hand soap that way.)

In the end, I used about $.40 worth of glycerin to make the equivalent of 6 bottles of hand soap. That’s a savings $17.60, well worth the half hour of my time it took to make the soap.

oooo thanks so much for the step by step. I will def hv to try this one out

Me too. The soft soap we use for hand-washing in the kitchen (cheap as used with dirty gardening hands) is currently collapsed and prone in the soap dish. NOT a pretty sight! Tip - if you have a box-grater (like a box with a grater as a lid) you don't get any airborne particles of soap to make you sneeze. We use ours when we are grating beeswax for home-made furniture polish.

Love it, have been trying for ages. I have some lovely hard soap, but only use it in the draws of my dressing table to keep things smelling nice. This is a good alternative. Thanks

Sounds great. Found any recipe for how to add pumice? I go through pumice hand soap in quantities in my line of work.