This easy DIY foaming hand soap can save your hands from dryness, save your body from toxic ingredients, and save you money– all at the same time!
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We all need to wash our hands. Some of us need to wash them many, many times each day. All that hand washing can really do a number on our skin, and even our overall health. Especially in the coldest, driest months of winter, your hands can end up chapped and raw, even if you diligently use lotions, creams, and gloves.
I wish I had had this soap when my children were very young and we lived in northern Illinois. All the diaper changing, wiping tiny noses, cooking and cleaning, combined with the bitter cold and dry air, left me with very dry hands. Lotion helped, and I faithfully wore gloves outside and a heavy cream with soft gloves to sleep. It wasn’t enough!
At the time, we used whatever liquid soap was on sale at Target. Later, we switched to a gentler, foaming hand soap from Whole Foods, mainly to reduce our (and our children’s!) exposure to toxins in cheap, antibacterial hand soap. That helped our poor, chapped hands, but only slightly.
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Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links. When you click on these links or use them to make a purchase, I may receive a small commission at no cost to you. These links help me offer this site. I recommend only products I have used and liked.
Is hand soap really toxic?
Well, it depends on what hand soap you use!
Most, if not all, of the hand soaps available in stores are loaded with ingredients that could fairly be labelled as “toxic”. Let’s just say that, at best, these ingredients are working against our thriving. And we use even more during cold and flu season, when we most want to protect our health!
Many ingredients in personal care products fall into a broad “toxic” category. They are lightly regulated in the U.S., and many people just don’t give these products a second thought. Like I didn’t. Until I did! The more you learn, the more you know…
If you or a family member are struggling with health problems, low in energy, or otherwise not feeling your best, attention to what you are putting in and on your body makes sense. (We absorb what we put on our bodies, after all!)
If you are in excellent health, give thanks and take steps now to keep it! Don’t do what I did and think about these things after you are in trouble.
What is in conventional hand soaps?
Some soaps are harmless; they tend to be made mostly of plant or animal fats, and maybe a little essential oil. These soaps often have short ingredient lists, and you can figure out what those ingredients are.
Many hand soaps have long lists of difficult-to-identify ingredients. You may find listed:
fragrances
many people love to smell good, and feel cleaner with a pleasing fragrance. The problem is that fragrances are not well regulated. A lot of people are blissfully unaware that fragrances are damaging. Some of the unwanted effects of many fragrances include allergic responses, migraines, exacerbation of lung conditions such as asthma, hormone disruption, heart and cardiovascular effects, blood sugar problems, and cancer. Learn more here.
I don’t know about you, but I want my heart and my hormones to work as intended, I hate migraines, and I definitely would rather not have cancer! (Actually, I am pretty sure you want similar things…)
triclosan
may affect hormone health and contribute to antibiotic resistance. This was the first ingredient we learned to avoid for our son with asthma and allergies. It isn’t supposed to be in soap anymore, though! We still avoid antibacterial soaps at home.
sodium lauryl sulfate
or SLS, or another variant of the term, is irritating to skin, at best. It is drying and may contribute to other health problems. Many women avoid it on their hair for appearance reasons, especially for curly hair.
phthalates
appear under many names and are known to disrupt hormone and reproductive health.
DEA
or diethanolamine– a carcinogen in larger quantities, but may not cause cancer in humans in the quantities in which it is present in soaps
parabens
mimic estrogen, which is a hormone that needs to be in balance with other hormones in the body, and differently in men versus women. Too much estrogen may decrease muscle, increase fat, and alter normal puberty and reproductive processes.
Some of these chemicals may not be enough to harm us, or maybe they do! We may not all have the same risk, either. For example, what about small children, anyone with immune or hormone issues, frequent hand washers, poor detoxifiers, times we have broken skin, pregnant women, and so on?
Don’t be too scared about these (and other) chemicals– just learn more here and here, then take simple steps to keep your soap working for you, at least when you are at home!
What to do about your hand soap
Given how many times a day we use hand soap, it is a high-priority lifestyle change! Happily, it is also a very easy one, and it can be budget-friendly as well.
You can purchase excellent hand soaps in bar, liquid, and foaming forms. More good news– these healthier options are becoming more readily available in common stores.
You really need to read (and understand) the labels, though. Many supposedly “eco-friendly” or “natural” products are not at all good either for the earth we live on or our own bodies! Know your ingredients and their risks. A helpful tool is the EWG website; you can look up a specific product and see how they rated it and why.
Sometimes, better-for-you soap comes with a certain price tag. If you want gentle soap, but want to keep your spending down, look no further than Castile soap!
What is Castile soap?
You may be guessing that Castile soap comes from Castile, and you would be right! Olives grow well in Castile, a region in Spain, and olive oil makes good soap.
True soaps are traditionally made from oil (either plant or animal fats) with a base ingredient, but now a lot of soaps are actually detergents that rely on chemical surfactants for their cleaning effect. No wonder they are drying!
While it might not seem obvious to clean with oil, it is a very gentle, time-tested way to clean our skin and more. Our forebears made soap out of animal fat, such as lard! The recent trend of oil cleansing for the face is another example of oil being an effective cleaning agent.
Today, a lot of castile soaps include cheaper oils than olive oil, such as coconut oil. You can buy it in bar form and liquid form. I will show you how to use either form for a simple, DIY foaming hand soap.
How to Make a Simple DIY Foaming Hand Soap
I will share two ways to do this, both easy and affordable. The first is easier, but costs a little more. The second takes a little more effort, but it is extremely cheap. Take your pick! For either one, you need:
- water
- Castile soap– either bar or liquid
- a foaming soap pump– this can be a foaming soap pump you purchased, or a bottle of foaming soap you got from a store– either dump out the soap or use it first, then fill with your better-quality soap
Foaming hand soap using liquid Castile soap
This method is beyond easy! Fill your soap pump most of the way with water. You can use distilled or filtered water. I just use tap water. We will, after all, wash our hands in tap water!
To the water in your pump, add some liquid Castile soap directly from the bottle. I used to use about a tablespoon of Castile soap, but now I usually add more like 2 tablespoons for a better foam. You can double that if you want a thicker foam. Screw the top on and pump a couple of times so it is ready to pump.
A quart of liquid Castile soap runs between $10-15 where I live right now. Stock up when there is a sale! Since you will use 1-4 tablespoons per bottle of soap, that quart will fill a lot of soap pumps. So, it isn’t terribly expensive.
That’s it! So easy… children can learn to refill the soap pumps! Keep reading for suggestions for enhancing your soap a bit.
Foaming hand soap using a bar of Castile soap
This method takes some simple preparation, but it isn’t difficult and requires very little hands-on time. We will liquefy a bar of soap, then use it just like we would the purchased, liquid version.
The huge caveat for these instructions: every brand of Castile soap is a bit different. My instructions are specific to the Simple Truth brand. If you use a different brand, the process will be the same but the proportions may be very different!
I like the Simple Truth brand because I can get it conveniently at Kroger, and especially because it is soft and easy to cut up. Other brands are much harder to cut, and more expensive per bar. However, because they are more dense, they will yield more soap, making them ultimately cheaper per soap pump (or per quart of Castile). I stick with the ease of chopping up the softer soap.
I pay $3 per bar at regular price, and each bar yields 4 quarts, so I am paying $.75 per quart. Definitely a very cheap way to refill my soap pumps!
The process:
Chop up your soap bar. I like to cut my bar into fourths, knowing I will get four quarts in the end. (If I am making several quarts at once, I put the number of quarter-bars I need all in the same pot and divide the liquid evenly among my quart containers at the end.) The Simple Truth bars slice about like a hard cheese, so I chop them up pretty small. The pieces don’t need to be precisely uniform, though.
Put the chopped-up soap into a saucepan with some water. 2 cups per quart is more than enough; just be sure you don’t have more water than your intend to have soap! So, no more than one quart per quarter of a bar of soap. Much less is just fine.
Heat the water and soap to a simmer. You can let it simmer along until the soap dissolves, boil it hard for a few minutes and then turn the heat off, or something in between. Stir it a little here and there, especially if the soap chinks start to clump up on the bottom of the pan.
Once the soap dissolves, or the water is hot and it is partly dissolved, turn of the heat and let it cool. the rest will dissolve as it cools. If they don’t, you can always turn the heat back on and try again!
Use a funnel if needed to pour the liquid soap into a container for storage. If the liquid is less than one quart, add water so that you have one quart per quarter of a soap bar. Old liquid Castile soap bottle work wonderfully well for this, but you can use whatever container you choose.
To prepare your foaming soap pump, do exactly what you would with purchased liquid Castile: fill an empty foaming soap pump mostly with water, then add 1-4 tablespoons of your liquefied Castile soap and screw the top on.
Ways to enhance your DIY Foaming Hand Soap
I never add anything to mine, maybe out of laziness! However, I have tried a couple of ways to make my foaming hand soap even better, which you can do if you want.
- add a teaspoon or so of a liquid oil to the soap pump along with the Castile– olive oil, almond oil, and fractionated (so it doesn’t solidify!) coconut oil are good choices and will make your soap more moisturizing. Not a bad thing if you are hard on your hands or experiencing very dry weather.
- add a half teaspoon of glycerin to your soap pump– glycerin is softening to the skin and you may like to use it to tend to hands that are hardworking or otherwise dry.
- add whatever essential oil or essential oil blend you enjoy– you could do this just for the pleasure of a good smell, beneficial health properties of particular oils, or a mood boost from the scent. You could make this a lot simpler by just adding your chosen oil to the bottle of Castile soap and not needing to add it to the soap pump every time!
Are there any downsides to foaming hand soap?
There is one and only one downside to this DIY foaming hand soap, as far as I can see.
Castile soap is made of oil. This is good news, since the oil is effective yet gentle and doesn’t dry your skin out!
However, oil-based soaps leave a residue in the sink, though not on your hands. Maybe that is a reason the chemical, detergent-style liquid soaps became so popular and largely replaced bar soaps? They don’t leave much soap scum, but the residue from oil-based soaps adds up to soap scum in the the sink, which you will need to scrub out now and then.
I find I need to give the bathroom sinks a good scrub once a week. A mix of equal parts plain vinegar and dish soap and a minute or two of scrubbing per sink is enough to get the sinks looking good. While we also use Castile soap in the kitchen, I don’t notice much buildup in the kitchen. I scrub the kitchen sink more than once a week, though.
What else can I do with DIY foaming hand soap?
There are many uses for liquid Castile soap! Some of the ones I use the most are:
- use it as a shower soap. We do this and is it economical and gentle on our skin. I don’t notice much soap scum, but I scrub the shower out every week. Well, most weeks. It is less of a problem in the shower than in the bathroom sinks.
- use it for shampoo. This does not work for me AT ALL! Other people use it for their hair with no problem, though.
- use the liquid Castile to make a simple, nontoxic cleaning spray. Stay tuned for that recipe!
Will my hands still be dry if I use Castile soap?
They might! But not nearly as dry.
When we switched to this DIY foaming hand soap, we still lived in northern Illinois. It was cold, it was dry, winter was long, and we did a lot of hand washing throughout cold and flu season. Nothing we did saved us from chapping!
Using Castile soap helped a lot, though. We all noticed improvements, including the compulsive over-washers in the family. We still had some dryness, but much less. The over-washers had more trouble than the rest of us, but also less than before.
Now, we live in Georgia and don’t have much of a winter. It is a little cool and dry (from the furnace, mainly) in January, and my hands feel dry enough to put lotion on them a few times a day. Not every time I dried them, like in Illinois. And I haven’t slept with thick hand cream and gloves in the six winters we have been here!
DIY foaming hand soap is perhaps my very favorite DIY– easy, frugal, supportive of our health, and comfortable on our skin.
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