How To Make Bar Soap - 5 Tips Learning how to make bar soap is not so hard except for all the confusing instructions out there. This article is not a step by step detailed study, but is more of an overview with some tips that may prove useful. Bar soap is a combination of three basic ingredients. You add a certain amount of lye to a certain amount of water and then add that solution to a certain amount of fats or oils. That gets at the basics. Soap is the product of a mixture of lye and water with oils or fats. It's just that simple. But the amounts are very critical. That is so because it takes a certain amount of lye to turn a certain amount of oil or fat to soap. You have to get the amounts just right or you get bad results. If you have too much lye you end up with caustic lye floating around in the soap. It will burn the user. If you have too much oil, you get some version of an oily mess and not really very good soap. So the measurements are critical. By the way, the lye used to make bar soap is sodium hydroxide. Other kinds of lye are used to make liquid soap. Lye has a well-deserved reputation for being nasty stuff. It will burn skin and do all kinds of bad things. It should be handle with extreme caution. It should not be used around children. But with safety glasses firmly in place it really is not much to be feared by adults. Once we have established the main ingredients of soap and the importance of proper measuring you must know that the oils or fats used to make soap are response to some degree for what kind of soap you get. As an extreme example, if one used large amounts of castor oil in soap you get a really fluffy lather but you also get a bar that dries to be a little bit on the soft side. It's actually a shampoo bar. So using different oils gives the soapmaker different finished results. Choosing the right oils in the right proportion is critical to making great soap. For one final tip, consider this. Just about everybody likes to smell of handmade soap. You can choose to just use natural oils for scent and get some really nice aromas in your soap. In addition, by using essential oils for scents you also might get some aromatherapy benefits to the soap as well. That's really worth looking into, using all natural oils for scenting your soap. Learning how to make bar soap takes just a little study and a little practice... if you can get some good directions and maybe an easy soap recipe.