Making homemade hand soap from bar soap is all over the blogosphere lately.  When I first read about this, my first reaction was, “Interesting but I don’t think I will ever do that.  Nice, scented, liquid hand soap is so cheap anyway.”  But in a classic “never say never” example, I found myself in a situation where this particular project suited the job perfectly.

You see, it is pretty easy to find liquid hand soap in every color of the rainbow and every scent imaginable.  But it is almost impossible to find liquid hand soap without any scents, colors, or antibacterial agents in it!  Believe me, I have looked!

We also happen to have a member of our family who is very allergy-sensitive to various soaps and must always use Dove white bar soap.  So, the bar soap to liquid hand soap project was a perfect fit!

There are a lot of recipes out there to try.  I was in a bit of a hurry to make mailing deadlines when I had to make my batch so I went with the simplest recipe possible, which was this one.

First, assemble your tools.

You will need:

• A bar of soap
• A cheese grater
• A medium-large microwave safe bowl
• A funnel
• Water (preferably RO, distilled or filtered water)
• Glycerin
• A decorative pump bottle to put your finished hand soap in

First, grate the bar of soap into little shreds.

Be careful with small children who might mistake it for cheese!

Mix with 3 cups water

And two teaspoons glycerin.  (You can find glycerin at CVS pharmacy in the facial soap section.)

Microwave for 3 minutes.

You will have  a bubbly soup.

Let it cool and use the funnel to pour it into your bottle of choice.

You can create a nice label for the bottle by printing on a computer label, sticking that to the bottle and then putting a piece of clear packing tape over the label to make it somewhat waterproof.

Done!

This recipe made a lot of soap.  In addition to this bottle, we had at least another bottle’s worth left over.  We poured the rest into a large soap pump we already had with some remaining soap in it.  The consistency of this soap is quite watery.  It is not thick and gelatinous like regular hand soap.  It is more like milk.  But it does the job and is a little more convenient to use than bar soap and doesn’t make a mess in the soap dish/counter like bar soap does.

We have another bar to convert and may try it without the glycerin this time to see if it thickens up a bit more.