Hopefully, you’re already greening your hand washing routine with reusable soap dispensers and other tactics. However, another way to keep it green and clean is to reuse all those weird soap slivers you end up with.
Homemade hand soap made with left-over soap slivers:
Collect old soap slivers. You’ll need a bunch. If you just want to make some homemade hand soap, and you have zero leftover slivers, you can buy a natural, organic, detergent-free bar of soap, but really it kind of defeats the reuse purpose. This is more for folks who already use bar soap.
Make some distilled water. You can buy some, but it’s cheaper to make your own. Simply leave a gallon of water sitting out on your counter for a couple of days. This allows any odd stuff in your water to evaporate out.
- Chop your soap slivers up into super tiny pieces or grate the slivers.
- Boil 3-4 cups of your water. Once it’s nice and hot, add the soap pieces.
- Mix then allow the mixture to sit on a low boil.
- Watch the consistency and if needed, add more soap and or water.
- Once it appears to be the right thickness, do a final really good mixing session. The mixture needs to be completely blended or little soap hardened pieces will show up, which of course will clog your pump.
- After the final mix, run a test. Your test is to let it sit out overnight. If you come back and it’s too thick, heat and add more water. Getting the thickness right is the hard part. It depends on the soap. If you add 3 oz of soap or so, start with 3-4 cups H2o and go from there. It will turn out different depending your soap, so this is a project you need to watch, at least the first time you do it.
EXTRAS:
- Experiment with adding a few drops of organic essential oils.
- You can also make scrubby shower soap. Start with the liquid soap then add scrubby bits, such as ground almonds or oatmeal. DO NOT put this in a pump. It’ll clog. You need to put it in a bottle.
- To make a herbal hand soap, boil organic herbs in the distilled water BEFORE you add the soap silvers. Remove the herbs and strain before adding soap slivers.
- If you want to play and get fancy try adding a few tablespoons of Aloe Vera, honey, coconut or olive oil, vanilla or cinnamon (boil whole sticks), flower essences and more – really whatever you like. This is an almost 100% free project, so mess-ups won’t kill you.
You can also use this to clean your house, not just your body.
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Distilled water is NOT made by leaving the water on the counter. While the water will go flat, all the impurities remain in the water. Distilled water is made by collecting the steam from boiling water. Please feel free to research distilled water to verify this information. When you put such inaccurate information on your site, I get concerned that all of the contents of the site might not be accurate / safe. Wishing you the best.