Essential Oils For Soap Making

By using your favorite Essential Oils For Soap Making you will enhance the fragrance of your soap bars tremendously more than just adding the dried herbs into the mix.

Some essential oils are powerfully strong and others will dissipate rather quickly. 

Essential oils are distilled and extracted from plants and herbs to capture their essence in a potent liquid form. A little goes a long way.  You don't have to use that much.

Popular Essential Oils.

Some of the more popular essential oils for soap making are: Eucalyptus, Lavender, Lemon, Lemongrass, Lime, Ginger, Peppermint, Rose, Rosemary and Tea Tree.

You may want to try some of these popular essential oils to see which ones you like. Once you find a number of essential oils that you love to smell you may want to start blending them together. There are hundreds of essential oils out there for your nose to test out!

Research your Essential Oils for Soap Making

Essential oils can help with certain conditions of the body including skin conditions, rashes, itching, insect bites and acne just to name a few. It may be worth it to research the medicinal uses of certain plants and herbs when using their essential oils in your soap. Here is a link to AromaWeb for more detailed information on essential oils and their uses.

How much Essential Oil can be added?

How much essential oil should be used when making your soap?  That's a great question and here's the answer use 1% - 5% of the total oil amount used in your soap batch.

For example, If you are using 20.0 ounces of oil for your soap batch and you want to add 2% essential oil to the mix then you would times 20.0 X .02 % = 0.04 ounces of essential oil. 

So the answer is: you would use .04 oz. of essential oil for this batch (which is 2% of the total oil amount of 20.0 oz).

Experimentation is required here. A little essential oil goes a long way. Better to use too little than too much. It is not recommended to use more than 5% essential oil as it could irritate your skin when using the soap.

When do you add your Essential Oils?

Add your essential oils to your soap during the ‘trace’ step in soap making. Trace is when the soap substance begins to thicken up to a viscosity similar to gravy.

'Trace' is a very important step where most of your additives will be put into the mix and stirred vigorously until it's time to pour the substance into the mold. 

The different oils and fats used to make soap will cause trace to happen at a faster or slower rate.