When buying soap you usually don’t find one that is made with only one oil. The rule is generally to use a combination of oils to achieve the desired effects, things such as a good lather, a hard bar, a soap that is conditioning, rinses well and does not go rancid quickly. Each individual oil brings different properties to the soap.

While this may be shocking to my children, I’m sure my dad would attest to the fact that I do not always follow the rules, so when a lady asked me if I could make a soap with only coconut oil, I said I would give it a try. This was probably a couple years ago, but fortunately I was familiar with a handy on-line tool called a soap or lye calculator. This tool allows you to enter the amount of various oils you would like to use in your soap, and it will calculate the amount of lye and water you need to add. Using this very handy tool I was able to come up with a soap recipe that has only coconut oil, water and lye as the ingredients.

The first thing I found out about this soap is that it is a very hard bar of soap. I found this out upon trying to cut the soap into bars. Using various tools I attempted to cut this soap but instead the soap would crack or break into chunks. They were not pretty bars. After approximately 6 weeks of curing I sampled this soap in the shower. I discovered that it was a nice soap with lots of bubbly lather. Not only is this soap nice for a shower, it’s great cleansing properties make it an ideal soap for people who choose to make their own laundry soap.

The second time I was asked, by this same lady, to make this recipe I decided to alter the recipe by adding more water in hopes that it would be soft enough to cut. Less that 24 hours after making the soap it was still too hard to cut, and I again ended up with some odd shaped soaps.

This brings us to today when I made this soap again. I made a small (2 pound) batch and poured it into individual soap molds.

I discovered that this soap was ready to come out of the molds after only about 4 hours. It will still have to sit for about six week before it is ready use or sell.