Fine and dandy, but where the heck do I get palm oil or coconut oil?
Coconut oil you may find locally in a
restaurant supply shop in your city.
Palm oil can be a lot more difficult to find.
Or see our oils page.

Lye!? Eewww.
Sure, lye is not just for opening drains. ;) Soap is a result of a chemical reaction between lye, fat and water. In 24hrs, you no longer have lye, fat and water. You have soap! If you followed the recipe exactly, you won't have any lye at all in your soap.

I want to use fragrances instead of essential oils.
Some fragrances work great and others do not. When adding scenting material at trace to your soap base you have to be very careful. The best scenting material for this way of making soap base is a fragrance that has been made for soap making AND tested for that purpose. If you want to use fragrance, please purchase Soap Crafters Fragrances which are certified for cold process, which have been tested for adding at trace in cold process soap and also tested in Crafting Soap. Look for the words 'certified for cold process' in the fragrance description.

I want to add herbs and flower petals to my soap!
Don't add it to your soap base at this time. Wait until you craft it. Adding herbs, powders, colorants, and fragrance oils can ruin your soap's saponification process. Some experts have managed to get around this rule with certain substances, but it really isn't worth the chance of ruining a whole batch of soap.

The most common problems

There are no "air bubbles" in soap usually, but a stick blender can actually cause little tiny empty holes in the soap. If you have bubbles in your soap, and there is liquid in them then they are really lye pockets and this is not safe to use. You might be able to save it by crafting it.

If there are tiny pin holes with no liquid in them through the texture of the soap, these are caused by overstirring with a stick blender. They are nothing to be concerned about. :)

Gone Cold.: If your soap goes cold during the first 24 hours or turns to mush, you probably lost the saponification process. There can be a lot of reasons for this. Your weights of oils, or lye may have been off causing a bad batch and Mother Nature shut down your operation. Or your temperature was not high enough with the fats and it just lost temperature. Or it just caught a chill. :) After thinking long and hard about what you did during weighing, and if you're sure your weighing was correct, then pour it into your soap pot, put it on the stove. Heat it while stirring constantly. When it reaches 130, remove from heat, pour back into a fresh mold. This is what I call 'kick starting' it.