Handmade Soap Bliss

Soap is a surfactant cleaning compound used for personal or minor cleaning. It usually comes in solid moulded form, termed bars. In somewhat recent years, the use of thick liquid soap has been becoming increasingly more widespread, especially from dispensers in public washrooms. Soap is used in conjunction with water for washing and cleaning. The wet soap residue and the dirt or soil are rinsed off with clean water afterwards. In the developed world, synthetic detergents have superseded soap as a laundry aid.

Many soaps are mixtures of sodium or potassium salts of fatty acids which can be derived from oils or fats by reacting them with an alkali (such as sodium or potassium hydroxide) at 80°-100 °C in a process known as saponification. The fats are hydrolyzed by the base, yielding glycerol and crude soap. Historically, the alkali used was potash made from the deliberate burning of vegetation such as bracken, or from wood ashes.

Soap is derived from either oils or fats. Sodium Tallowate, a common ingredient in many soaps, is in fact derived from rendered animal fat. Soap that is made of vegetable oils, such as olive oil, are generally termed castile soap.

The common process of purifying soap involves removal of sodium chloride, sodium hydroxide, and glycerol. These impurities are removed by boiling the crude soap curds in water and re-precipitating the soap with salt.

Most of the water is then removed from the soap. This was traditionally done on a chill roll which produced the soap flakes commonly used in the 1940s and 1950s. This process was superseded by spray dryers and then by vacuum dryers.

The dry soap (approximately 6-12% moisture content) is then compacted into small pellets. These pellets are now ready for soap finishing. Soap finishing is the process of converting raw soap pellets into salable product, usually bars.

TRIVIA: Moses gave the Israelites detailed laws governing personal cleanliness. Biblical accounts suggest that the Israelites knew that mixing ashes and oil produced a kind of hair gel. Soap is mentioned twice in the Bible, but it is generally agreed that the Hebrew word “borith”, which has been translated as soap, is a generic term for any cleansing agent.