Soap Making

Overview

To feed my new interest in chemistry I decided to make my own bars of soap. I did this a while back, around 2018, and thought it would be cool to explain the process and show my results. I could not find any pictures I took while making them, but I still have some of the soap bars in 2023! (Hint: I did bad.) We can take a look at what might have gone wrong with the process using the already made bars and also consider my poor equipment choices. For a quick summary, saponification is a “hydration reaction where free hydroxide breaks the ester bonds between the fatty acids and glycerol of a triglyceride, resulting in free fatty acids and glycerol, which are each soluble in aqueous solutions” (thanks ScienceDirect). In plain english, a chemical is added to oil, that chemical breaks the oil into individual parts that compose soap. These parts have a hydrophobic tail and hydrophilic head that arrange themselves into spheres called micelles which can trap the oil to clean your hands. That mechanism of how soap actually cleans, in my opinion, is the coolest part. NileBlue has a great Youtube video summarizing that.