Handmade Cold-Process Tallow & Coconut Oil Face Soap
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Ooooooooooo buddy do I love this cold process face soap bar chock full of easy to find and natural ingredients. It’s a great homemade soap formulation, and a simple one at that, that I came up with myself to wrap the loveliness of using tallow on our skin along with the cleansing power of coconut oil into a lovely soap bar that just works better for me than a pure tallow soap recipe. I’ve got pretty sensitive skin that’s combination of oily and dry (yay me) and I’ve very prone to acne and break outs from just breathing, so I was definitely looking for something to clean my pores out and help clear my skin up.
Not ready to make your own soap yet?! Purchase a bar from my online farm stand!
This HELPED SO MUCH! It’s been really good for all skin types according to feedback I’ve gotten over the years. I just loveeeee scrubbing my face down with this bar to start my day right and then greasing up with my tallow balm and then washing the dust away after a long day of farmin’. Don’t be fooled though; this bar doesn’t have to be just for your face… you can use it on your butt, too. I ain’t judgin’. Soap is soap, guys.
Making soap is a fascinating chemical process that uses the natural chemical reaction between the lye solution and hard oils, fats, and liquid oils to produce soap as the end product. It’s very neat to understand exactly what is happening adding two naturally occurring ingredients together to have a bar of cleansing goodness with natural antibacterial properties. Soap doesn’t have bleach and antibiotics in it; that’s detergent. And that, my friends, is literal poison rubbed all over the largest organ of your bodies.
Beef tallow is an easy fat for me to come by since we raise our own cattle and I have gallons of it because I save ALL THE FAT and render my own tallow. It makes a lovely, creamy and bubbly lather. You can use the suet fat from around the kidneys, or even the fat trimmings, meaning the fat that touches muscle, because soap pretty well removes any odor after the saponification process; and if any remains, it doesn’t transfer to your skin. Coconut oil hardens the bar and just rounds it out into a dang good face cleanser. I add bentonite clay and activated charcoal to help detox my skin and smooth it out. Scent with your favorite essential oils, my favorites are frankincense and lavender for this soap! One of these facial soap bars lasts me 6 months!
Be sure and check out my other soap recipes here!
Let’s get to making some soap, shall we?
Equipment You Might Want:
- Immersion Blender
- Glass Mixing Bowl
- Spatula
- Soap Molds
Ingredients:
- 3.9oz distilled water
- 3.9oz sodium hydroxide (lye)
- 8.3oz grass-fed tallow
- 16.7oz coconut oil
- 4.9oz goat milk
- 2 Tbs activated charcoal
- 1 Tbs bentonite clay
- 40 drops lavender essential oil
- 40 drops frankincense essential oil
- 1 tsp kaolin clay
This recipe is provided given the person using it has knowledge and understanding of basic lye safety and cold process soap making. If you don’t know how to make soap, please do some research prior to using this recipe as the instructions aren’t going to provide every tiny thing you should be doing and assume the user has basic soapmaking experience and knowledge. As with all soapmaking recipes, you should run them through a soap calculator to verify the lye and liquid amounts are correct for this recipe, due to human error. I’ve checked this recipe and use it constantly, but you never know what these fat fingers are capable of typing.
Step 1: Prep
Into a lye safe container, measure out the distilled water and then add the measured lye to the water. Stir until dissolved and set aside to cool.
Measure tallow and coconut oil into a pan and melt over low heat on stove top until almost melted. Shut off heat and stir to allow the oils to finish melting. Transfer oils to preferred soapmaking bowl and pitcher of your choice.
To the melted oils, add goat milk, activated charcoal, and bentonite clay.
To a small glass jar, measure out kaolin clay and essential oils. Stir to combine and allow to sit. You can also do this up to a day in advance as kaolin clay really helps anchor the essential oils into your soap so they don’t dissipate and lose their scent fast.
Step 2: Make Soap
Blend together the oil and milk mixture really well with your immersion blender.
Leaving your immersion blender in the oil, add the lye water carefully to prevent splashing. Blend in short bursts until you see a very light trace (this happens quickly due to it partly being coconut oil soap and small batches).
Once to a very light trace, add in kaolin clay and essential oils and blend until just combined. You can use your immersion blender or stir in by hand with a spatula depending on the thickness of your batter and your preference.
Step 3: Pour
Pour soap batter into mold(s) of choice. I use cute little silicone round flower molds that make about a 2-3 ounce bar (this recipe will make 10 bars approximately).
After pouring, allow soap to harden before removing from the molds. I let them sit about 24 hours.
Step 4: Cure
Remove soap from molds and allow to cure in a well ventilated area for 4+ weeks. The longer they sit, the harder they get, and the longer they last.
You’ve now made your own bar of soap so go scrub your butt!
Notes:
This recipe is made using the “milk in oil” method, meaning the lye to liquid ratio is still 1:2 but the lye is reacted in a 1:1 ratio with distilled water and the other part of liquid is goat milk added directly to the oils. No needing to pre-freeze goat milk to react with lye and no constant stirring to prevent scorching. It’s my preferred method, but if it isn’t yours, then just add the two liquid measurements together and freeze that weight in goat milk and react your lye with it and add this lye mixture to your oils instead of adding milk. Do you!
You can substitute lard for tallow in this recipe without any adjustment since their SAP values are similar. DO NOT substitute any other oils unless you have verified their SAP values are similar enough to do so, otherwise the lye ratio to oils will not be correct.
Equipment
- Glass mixing bowl
Ingredients
- 3.9 oz distilled water
- 3.9 oz sodium hydroxide lye
- 8.3 oz grass-fed tallow
- 16.7 oz coconut oil
- 4.9 oz goat milk
- 2 Tbs activated charcoal
- 1 Tbs bentonite clay
- 40 drops lavender essential oil
- 40 drops frankincense essential oil
- 1 tsp kaolin clay
Instructions
- Into a lye safe container, measure out the distilled water and then add the measured lye to the water. Stir until dissolved and set aside to cool.
- Measure tallow and coconut oil into a pan and melt over low heat on stove top until almost melted. Shut off heat and stir to allow the oils to finish melting. Transfer oils to preferred soapmaking bowl and pitcher of your choice.
- To the melted oils, add goat milk, activated charcoal, and bentonite clay.
- To a small glass jar, measure out kaolin clay and essential oils. Stir to combine and allow to sit. You can also do this up to a day in advance as kaolin clay really helps anchor the essential oils into your soap so they don't dissipate and lose their scent fast.
- Blend together the oil and milk mixture really well with your immersion blender.
- Leaving your immersion blender in the oil, add the lye water carefully to prevent splashing. Blend in short bursts until you see a very light trace (this happens quickly due to it partly being coconut oil soap and small batches).
- Once to a very light trace, add in kaolin clay and essential oils and blend until just combined. You can use your immersion blender or stir in by hand with a spatula depending on the thickness of your batter and your preference.
- Pour soap batter into mold(s) of choice. I use cute little silicone round flower molds that make about a 2-3 ounce bar (this recipe will make 10 bars approximately).
- After pouring, allow soap to harden before removing from the molds. I let them sit about 24 hours.
- Remove soap from molds and allow to cure in a well ventilated area for 4+ weeks. The longer they sit, the harder they get, and the longer they last.
Can you double or triple this recipe?
Yes! Just run the weights through a lye calculator because the lye measurement may not be exact just tripled from this recipe :)
i made this soap but did not add any fragrance. I unmolded the soap after 48 hours and it is still soft. Will it harden as time passes or will it remain soft because i did not use fragrance?
Omitting fragrance shouldn’t effect the end product! It shouldn’t be super soft, but should be holding its shape and not melting. As long as its not doing that, it will harden up as it cures in about 4-6 weeks.
thanx