What is lye water used in making homemade soaps?

Question

in order to make homemade soap

Answer 1

It's a nasty, corrosive, dangerous chemical that also happens to be 100% natural. You make it by soaking and/or boiling wood ash or you can buy it at Asian markets.

I point out that it's natural because too many people are mistakenly convinced that "natural" means "safe", and that causes them to be careless with things like lye water.

Answer 2

Lye water is simply sodium hydroxide mixed with water.

Yes, it is corrosive but once the oils and lye solution have mixed properly, the lye no longer exists.....it has become soap through the chemical reaction called saponification.

Unfortunately you cannot make soap with lye.  Products that do not use lye that we call soap are actually detergents.

Sodium hydroxide can be purchased from some hardware stores. It's usually in the plumbing isle. You may have to ask for it since it is often kept off the counter due to its use in illegal drug manufacturing.  You can also purchase lye from soap making supply houses or chemical supply houses.

This page lists companies that sell lye:

http://www.soap-making-essentials.com/so...

This page gives instructions on how to make handmade soaps:

http://www.soap-making-essentials.com/co...

Good luck!

Cathy Winsby

Veteran Soapmaker

Answer 3

Soap making is a chemical reaction, a base (lye) is needed to saponify the fat molecules into soap.  So lye is used to make soap, but there really isn't lye itself in the soap once it is soap.

Lye water + fats ==> soap + glycerin

The fats can be either animal or vegetable oils. Glycerin is a natural byproduct of saponification. Commercial manufacturers of soap remove the glycerin and use it for lotions, etc. Homemade soapmakers do not remove the glycerin, so handmade soap is very moisturizing to your skin.

Soap is technically a salt. Just as the elements in  table salt (sodium chloride) are dangerous separately, they form something beneficial when together. Sodium is a highly reactive metal and chlorine is a poisonous gas at room temperature, but as NaCl it's harmless and essential for life. Similarly, lye is dangerous by itself but beneficial when made into soap. It's also used to make paper among many other things.

Lye water has a very high pH which is neutralized when added to fats and oils (which are more acidic = low pH) & form soap.

People have been making soap using lye for thousands of years. Now we have detergents which are made from petroleum. The FDA will not allow companies to label something as 'soap' if it wasn't made using lye. Instead it could be called a 'beauty bar' or 'cleanser' or something like that.  Soap label ingredients often say 'sodium tallowate' or 'sodium cocoate'. This means tallow or coconut oil was mixed with sodium hydroxide (lye) to make the soap.

You can make solid bars of soap with sodium hydroxide (lye) or liquid soap with potassium hydroxide. You of course have to show these chemicals respect by wearing gloves and goggles as well as keeping the room ventilated, but I've never heard of someone drastically hurting themselves while making homemade soap! You need to be careful that you have just the right concentration of lye in your recipe, which is quite easy these days since we don't have to make lye from wood ash anymore & we have these new fangled digital scales! There are lots of helpful websites & books available too.

I remember my great grandmother rendering tallow & making lye from scratch & I'm incredibly grateful that soap is quite a bit easier to make these days, even though it's still a challenging but rewarding hobby.

Answer 4

lye is a nasty acciliade that is kinda like amonia and it is that base of alcli  like borax two of the same but dont mix it tgether  this stuff is nasty and if you start mixxing it 2-gether w/ other chenicals it will hurt you  be careful later roc