Handmade Soap

If you're looking for a practical hobby, this might be it. A soap business? Keep movin', Jack

Say your precious offspring has just uttered some choice words that would send Grandma into convulsions, and you want to teach your budding little punk a lesson. But nothing's too good for Junior—you've already vowed that no plebeian Ivory or tawdry Irish Spring bars shall touch his fair mucous membranes. No, you want something really special for his punishment, something he'll be whinging about to his therapist for years to come.

Well, have I got the book for you, Bunky! It's Handmade Soap: Recipes for Crafting Soap at Home by the editors of Country Living Magazine. This fair hardcover volume tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the ancient and noble profession of making soap and soaplike products, whether for use in early childhood torture or for the more prosaic use of getting clean.

Soap has been around for a very long while—legend dates it back to Roman times, when lye water combined with melted animal fat trickling from the temple on Mount Sapo to create a type of primitive soap substance. But modern commercially-made bars, suggest the authors, are vastly inferior to the joys of rich, fragrant, moisturizing handmade soap. (Isn't your mouth watering just thinking about it?)

The two most popular methods of making soap are melt-and-pour soapmaking, where one melts down a block of pre-made soap and pours it into specialty molds; and cold-process soapmaking, where one actually creates soap from lye, fat and other basic ingredients. This book describes both methods, but focuses almost wholly on the latter. It describes seven basic recipes for saponifying fats and oils into soap, and numerous adaptations of these recipes to create specialty soaps, body bars, shampoos and other goodies. There's a good selection of "working" soaps, such as laundry and kitchen soaps, pet shampoo, bug-repellent soap, and my favorite—the camouflage bar, which allows you to walk in the woods without alerting animals to your olfactory presence. Just for fun, the authors have also thrown in some recipes that, while often associated with soap, aren't actually soaps at all—soapwort shampoo, herbal hair rinses and bath bags, and scented bath oil.

Handmade Soap contains thorough information on the tools and materials you'll need, safety tips, step-by-step methods and troubleshooting. There's a full index and list of resources for purchasing ingredients in the back. The layout is clean and easy to read, and the illustrations are beautiful and appealing without being overly froufy. It's a terrific resource for anyone who's ever been interested in making soap as a hobby.

I wouldn't recommend this book for anyone who's looking to break into the handmade soap business, however. Although the authors insist that making soap is a simple process, the long list of equipment and unfamiliar ingredients may be off-putting even before newcomers get to the molten-fat-and-boiling-lye stage. Soapmaking also isn't for folks who prefer to fly by the seat of their pants; getting a top-quality product requires careful weighing of all ingredients on an "electronic digital scale" which weighs in tenths of ounces (so say the authors, anyway). Finally, considering the expenses involved—buying essential oils, oakmoss absolute, and such esoteric ingredients as rosin and lye flakes—it would probably be difficult for a novice soapmaker to break even by selling his handmade wares. Handmade Soap definitely describes soapmaking as a labor of love.

But after all, doesn't your sweet little scatological brat deserve the best?

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