Can I make liquid soap from old bits and pieces of bar soap just by adding water in a sealed jar?
I think I read that somewhere, so I put a bunch of little soaps, (My husband loves to bring stuff back when we stay in hotels, but, he never does anything with it.) in a sealable jar, then filled it with water.
Now, two weeks later, the water is all absorbed into the soap, but it’s not liquid at all. I now have the biggest bar of gooey soap imaginable.
Do I just keep adding water until I have the desired liquidity?
You need to add vegetable glycerin to keep it liquid. 1 tablespoon of glycerin/10 cups water / 1 cup of soap is a good ratio. You should also grate the soap to ensure maximum surface contact with the water and glycerin, you cant just put chunks of soap in the jar and expect it to work.
Thank you, I’ll get some today. I guess, I’ll start over. Oh, can I put it in a food processor? I have an extra bowl and top.
It’s all pretty soft now, so grating it is out of the question.
I don’t believe what** Dorjän** said is true. Liquid soaps are made using potassium hydroxide as the alkali while solid soaps use sodium hydroxide. Adding water / glycerin will make it only more gooey - but it wont turn into liquid soap.
The best thing to do with slivers of soap left over is to stick them onto the new bar of soap. Let it sit overnight, and the two will be one. No more wasting soap slivers!
Soap has been one of my favorite interests since as a kid I saw Granny Clampett making it out of lye and hog fat in a big vat. I couldn’t figure out how grease and stuff that burns and the mafia uses to dispose of unwanted bodies could be the same stuff I wash my hands with, but when asked, my Mom said its true.
Pass forward decades, I read a book that proposed that soap was one of humankind’s earliest discoveries. Here’s the gist of it:
Imagine you’re an early human who just finished eating a wild boar that you cooked over your fire. your hands are really greasy, which bothers you. You could rub them in dirt, but that just makes them dirtier, as you have learned before. Or you could rub them in the ashes (containing lye) that are all around. And realize that your hands are clean after a quick rinse in water. And if you save that water containing grease and ash, you can clean other things with it, such as tools.
If you were making liquid soap from scratch yes, you would use potassium hydroxide. We’re turning bar soap into liquid and want to keep it that way. Goo is actually a better term - we want really gooey, soap that stays that way. Lots of water and glycerin works fine, the trick is breaking down the bar soap into fine pieces.
My cites are the bottle of homemade, liquid, pump-able bar-soap-turned-liquid sitting on my bathroom sink and these:
If you are going to use glycerin. don’t fly. If you get selected for a random hand-swabbing (which can happen even if you are going through Pre-Check), it will register as an explosive and you will get to experience intimate contact with a TSA officer.
Someplace around here I have a ‘secret family recipe’ for liquid soap - from my great-grandfather’s diaries from the 1870s. Offhand, all I remember is that he started from a hard German soap.
Sodium soaps and potassium soaps are either hard or soft depending on which fats you use to make them. Potassium stearate is hard soap, period. Potassium soaps are used for liquid soaps because they stay in solution better than sodium soaps (actually, that’s making a virtue out of necessity - removing excess water from potassium soaps is difficult). Sodium soaps separate from water readily, and residual glycerin from the saponification reaction is distilled out.
It is for this reason that making liquid soap from hard milled soap works better with a plasticizer, and glycerin is an excellent choice. It helps break up that gel-like structure, it doesn’t interfere too much with lathering, and it moisturizes! You still need plenty of water, though, and I suspect this is your main problem. If you put several small soaps in a jar with water, your ratio of water to soap is probably 3:1 or 4:1, and not the 10:1 or more it takes to get a pumpable soap.
Thank you, but I knew that. My husband is a firefighter/ haz-mat instructor.
My problem now is buying the glycerin. I went on a scavenger hunt at Fred Meyer. It’s a grocery and other stuff store. They have garden, auto, clothing, shoes, pharmacy, but no glycerin. 6 employees asked if I was finding what I needed. Each one sent me to a different area of the store. Finally, the checker said to check at the pharmacy. They didn’t have it either, but they could order it.
I’ll check a crafts store first.
So, thank you all for the information. I may forget the whole thing and just buy some white liquid hand soap and tell him I made it from his damn little bars… Wait, that would just make him bring home more… sigh.
The question was about converting cake soap to liquid… to make use of them.
But these days they use sodium laureth ethanoate in body or facial liquid soaps , shampoo…
Cheap hand cleaner may be sodium laureth sulfate, which can sting the eyes.
When I was a kid, I wanted to take up whittling for some reason.
I had a small pen knife and someone got me a couple bars of regular white bath soap to practice on.
After I stabbed the everliving hell out of my left hand (my left index finger was numb for what seemed like weeks, I still have a scar), I gathered all the little chips and chunks and microwaved them with the intent of pouring into a mold to reclaim the bar. It never solidified and stayed a sort of slimy, viscous consistency. It worked fine in a Softsoap hand pump dispenser.
Then it wasn’t regular soap. Regular soap will melt in the microwave and re-harden upon cooling, except it will be crumbly and possibly a little burned (except for Ivory - that stuff has so much air whipped into it that it expands into a crumbly “souffle”). What you had was probably a “bath bar” like Dove (well, not exactly like Dove - that remains a little soft, but not liquid).
