I have a great prejudice against bar soap. This is partially because of the filthy hands of certain other (male) members of my household who use the bar soap and leave it looking dirtier than the hands it's supposed to clean. And partially because I'm lazy and don't want to have to work up a lather all by myself from such a hard and unyielding soap. Doesn't the soap know that I only have ten seconds to wash my hands before the toddler whacks the baby with a shoe horn and all hell breaks loose in the living room?
Inconsiderate bar soap. Making me do all the work.
So I'm all about the liquid hand soap in the dispensers. What I am NOT all about anymore is strong fragrances. Ever since being pregnant with Charlie, I've been much more sensitive to anything with a strong fragrance, and boy howdy, do liquid hand soaps ever stink. They stink pretty, to be sure, but it is just too much for me.
I have not yet found a liquid soap that doesn't knock me back with its Rain Fresh scent or whatever the hell. And so, of course, I decided I had to make my own.
Because what I needed was one more thing I make myself rather than buy at the store like a normal person.
I used this method, with a bar of Ivory soap. Because there ain't nothin' in Ivory soap, thank you Ivory people for resisting the scented bandwagon. My bar of soap was only half as large as the one used in the recipe, which makes me wonder why anyone would need an eight-ounce bar of soap. That's a really big bar of soap.
ANYWAY AGAIN.
Since my bar of soap was half as big as the behemoth bar called for, I adjusted the rest of the ingredients accordingly, got the soap bits all melted, and left it to cool overnight.
In the morning, I checked on it and found that the consistency was way too thick for a soap dispenser. Luckily, the recipe addressed this, and said it can be made thinner by adding more water (quite a lot more, in my case) and blending it all up with a hand-held blender.
Which is why I was beating soap in a cooking pot with my blender at 6:30 this morning while Cubby sat at the table eating his oatmeal and interrogating me about what I was doing.
I'm being crazy, okay, son? Get used to it.
I did get it to the right consistency eventually, and that consistency is . . . snot. For real. It is snotty. It's all gloppy and makes ropey little strings when it's poured and . . . well. It's kind of gross. But it does work, and it doesn't stink to high heaven, and it's cheap. And now I have half a gallon of it, which is going to last a really long time. So it's snotty hands for me for the foreseeable future!
(I'm weird. I know. I've made my peace with it.)
10 comments:
About 3 years ago I bought a 48-oz refill bottle of Ivory liquid hand soap although it's not the same formula as the bars. It lists fragrance as an ingredient, but it's really faint. I think I found it at a grocery store. Don't know if it's still available since I still have a few ounces left and haven't looked for more. Anyway, when you run out or get tired of snot soap, you might want to try it.
I am also very sensitive to fragrances (allergic in some cases). As Becky said above, I use Ivory liquid soap, I actually thought it was unscented myself, but either way... When you runt out of snot soap, maybe look for that, I also buy mine at the grocery store.
Old fashioned Lava Soap cleans all!!!
With all your free time, you should calculate just how much you save the household doing all your cost saving chores. I'll bet, if you had the time that is, it would make your day. Hey, better yet, send the list to your dad and let him do it. You know his penchant for saving.
Those numbers should be interesting.
How about using ivory liquid dish soap? I use liquid dish soap in my dispensers, but not worried about the fragrance thing. Beth
i have fibromyalgia which makes me really, really sensitive to fragrances. I also have several skin conditions which limit the kind of soap i can use, including an allergy to mineral oil (which is in about 98 percent of all soaps, lotions, shampoo, etc). I make my own body butter using coconut oil, shea butter and almond oil/olive oil. I also found a great product at the store called Babyganics which is all natural, no parabens, no sulfates and NO MINERAL OIL (good news for my eczema)! It's a bit pricey for me but it's worth it. I think I'd agree with the above posters and buy the big refill containers at dollar general or whatever dollar store you have near you and use liquid dispensers. I'd damn sure do that before i used snotty soap! Just the description makes me want to barf ;-)
I've wanted to make liquid soap from all of the random bars of soap that people insist on giving as gifts, but I've never done it.
Mostly because that's a lot of time spent on making a product that exists in stores.
But, I don't buy it in the store. I just torture our household with the gifty bars of random ass soap that sometimes fits in the dish and sometimes doesn't but the hell if I'm going to throw soap away OR let it clog up my linen closet forever.
No. We'll use it. And we'll hate every WHY IS THIS TAKING SO LONG TO LATHER second of it.
Also, yes on the grotesque fruity bullshit flavors of these soaps. Just unnecessary.
To fix snotty home made liquid soap:
I read a bunch of posts after making my home made liquid soap and I did the following:
- added a little sea salt - don't think it made much difference
- ran the lot through my food processor in batches, for a few minutes Each. Solved the texture problem, now it is lovely!
I had used a hand blender on it, wouldn't do that again as made it very frothy.
But the food processor fixed the snotty texture. Pour into a jug, then drizzle into a pump pack and the rest into mineral water bottles. Lovely.
The perfect way to fix the texture is reducing the water into 1/2 to 2/3 of the recipe, then add any kind of light oil. It will lather as well, given you don't use too much water to dillute the soap
Owh, and the oil added is about 1/2 cups in this recipe
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