Making hand milled soap is an easy way to learn how to make soap for beginners. Keep reading to learn how to make hand milled soap with an easy charcoal & anise soap recipe from Amanda Gail Aaron’s new book, The Complete Guide to Natural Soap Making.
New Natural Soap Making Book
Is soap making a new hobby you’ve been wanting to explore? Have you made soap before but want to learn other soap making techniques? Learn a variety of soap making methods and explore easy to follow soap recipes and tutorials in Amanda Gail’s new book, The Complete Guide to Natural Soap Making.
As we discover in Amanda Gail’s new book, there are many different ways to make soap. New and beginning soapmakers will learn how to craft natural homemade soaps using five different soap making techniques. These natural soap making methods include:
- Hand Milled Soap Making
- Melt and Pour Soap Making
- Liquid Soap Making
- Hot Process Soap Making
- Cold Process Soap Making
In addition to comprehensive, easy to follow soap making tutorials, Amanda’s book also contains numerous natural soap recipes. Each of these recipes enable you to explore all of the soap making methods mentioned, then further build on that knowledge. In addition, you’ll also gain insight on essential soap making equipment and ingredients you need to get started. The book also contains insider soap design tricks and soap making techniques that will further guarantee your success.
Regardless of your preferred soap making method, you’ll find that soap making quickly becomes an addictive hobby. Therefore it won’t be long until you’re not only supplying natural soaps for your family, but for friends and coworkers too! You’ll also begin to build the foundation for achieving not just your soap making goals, but for starting a business to sell your natural soaps.
What Is Hand Milled Soap?
Two of the easiest ways for beginners to get started in soap making are through melt and pour soap making and hand milled soap making. While most of you are likely familiar with making melt and pour soap using a glycerin soap base, you may be less familiar with how to make hand milled soap.
If you’re looking for an easy (and affordable) way to learn how to make soap for beginners, then I highly recommend you learn how to make hand milled soap. You’ll find, that if you’re already a fan of handmade soaps, making hand milled soap is a great way to use up leftover soap slivers. It also allows you to customize your natural soaps with ingredients that offer additional benefits for your skin type.
Hand milled soaps are created by rebatching unscented (or leftover) soaps on the stovetop or in an oven. This is done to add scent and color, conditioning skin care ingredients or to salvage a botched cold process soap batch. Typically one makes hand milled soap by grating an existing soap bar, then mixing it will milk or water. Once the soap melts, other ingredients can be added to customize the fragrance, color or other properties of the soap.
Hand milling soap is an easy way to learn how to make custom natural soaps. The process is easier than making soap completely from scratch in which you combine lye and soap making fats. It’s also a safer process for anyone who has pets or small children in the home.
How to Make Hand Milled Soap
I hope that you’re as excited as I was the first time I learned how to make hand milled soap. Amanda was gracious enough to share her charcoal & anise hand milled soap recipe from her new book, which you can find below.
Anise & Charcoal Natural Soap Recipe
This stark black hand milled soap is naturally scented with anise, peppermint and lavender essential oils. Formulated with an easy to use hand milled soap base, this homemade soap recipe also contains activated charcoal. The addition of charcoal makes this hand milled soap perfect for acne prone skin, as charcoal works to draw out impurities, oils and toxins from skin.
Following is Amanda’s recipe for charcoal & anise soap (from her book) along with her instructions on how to make hand milled soap. This recipe yields four hand milled soap bars, each weighing approximately 113 grams. It can be made from start to completion in about an hour. You can use pre-bought soap shreds for this recipe. Alternately, you can also grate your own soap from bars of unscented cold or hot process soap.
Equipment Needed:
Digital scale
Glass container
1 (16-ounce) heatproof glass measuring cup
Silicone spatulas
Measuring spoons
Oval silicone mold (with at least 4 cavities)
Ingredients:
450 grams unscented and uncolored soap shreds
1/2 tablespoon charcoal powder
1 tablespoon dried rose petals
4 grams lavender essential oil
4 grams anise essential oil
2 grams peppermint essential oil
Instructions:
Start by prepping the essential oils for this soap. Do this by weighing out each of the three essential oils called for in the recipe. Then blend together in glass container and set aside.
Now wet the soap shreds.
Heat the moistened soap shreds until they become translucent and resemble mashed potatoes.
Once melted, remove the soap from heat.
Working quickly add the prepared essential oil fragrance blend. Then mix in the essential oils and the charcoal powder until all ingredients are thoroughly combined.
Now divide the rose petals among each mold cavity.
Quickly spoon the the soap into each mold cavity, covering the rose petals. Then use a spatula to smooth the soap down.
Once the soap has hardened, remove it from the mold.
Allow the finished hand milled soap bars to cure for two weeks prior to use.
To use, massage onto wet facial skin. Allow the soap to sit on your face, as you would a mask, for about one minute. Then rinse off and pat dry.
Get Your Soap Making Book
You can purchase The Complete Guide to Natural Soap Making to try all of Amanda’s recipes here!
To discover more natural soap recipes, sign up for my semi-weekly newsletter! You can also follow me on facebook, twitter, pinterest and instagram.
, 
, and 
. Or purchase Rosemary Gladstar’s best selling kindle ebook, 
for just $2.99! Don’t own a kindle? 
! It works on most devices including tablets, smartphones and desktop computers.
, by Susan Miller Cavitch which was first published in 1997.
, by Anne-Marie Faiola which was published in August of this year. Faiola, endearingly referenced as the “Soap Queen” ventured into soapmaking very similarly to the same way I did through book research and trial and error. As a result, unlike The Soapmaker’s Companion, Soap Crafting presents its content in a simple, straight forward manner that leaves no room for confusion. Easier for a beginner to grasp than The Soapmaker’s Companion, Faiola’s book not only breaks down the basics of soapmaking in a way that is simple and easy to understand, it is also presented with beautiful photography to guide you through the process so there’s no confusion – something that is lacking in The Soapmaker’s Companion which consists only of limited hand drawings and no actual photography. That said, The Soapmaker’s Companion is still an invaluable resource for those who are in pursuit of the all the information there is to have on making cold process soaps.