Foaming Hand Soap

There is a lot to love about foaming hand soap. 

That delightful little pillow of foam on your palm lathers quickly and rinses easily. It uses water and soap more efficiently, so it’s good for the planet and your wallet.  

But the best thing about it? It’s ridiculously easy to make your own. 

As a general rule I try to minimize my exposure to harmful chemicals in my personal use products. Also as a general rule, products that fit my criteria seem to cost more—which is something I enjoy working around by making them myself. And you can make a high-quality, earth-friendly foaming hand soap for a fraction of what you’d pay for one at the store. Heck, your soap will cost less than the cheapest soap you can find at the store.

A bit of math:

A 10-oz. bottle of foaming hand soap with (relatively) simple ingredients costs $3 to $5. Even if I refill that bottle when it’s empty, I’ll still spend $6 or $7 on a refill pouch, which works out to a little more than $2 per 10-oz. bottle.

The thing is, when you look at the list of ingredients, the first one is . . . water. Topped off with some cleansing agents. 

Well, shoot. Can YOU fill a bottle with water? Can YOU top it off with a cleansing agent? Then you can make your own foaming hand soap. (Although you’ll actually add these ingredients in the reverse order. We’ll get to that in a minute.)

The only somewhat magical ingredient in this whole equation is the bottle itself. The bottle has two chambers—the lower one holds the soap mixture, and the upper one is filled with air. When you press the pump, it forces air into the soap mixture, and voila, you’ve got Foamy Soap. 

You can purchase a pretty glass dispenser of course, or just buy a cheap bottle of foaming soap at the store, dump that crap out, and fill it with your own mixture.

Now, I’ve seen some tutorials that advocate simply taking regular liquid hand soap and watering that down in your foaming soap dispenser (using a ratio of about 1 part soap to 4 parts water). That will produce a foamy soap, but I’ve also read that by interfering with the proportions of ingredients in the original soap, you might reduce the soap’s effectiveness.

You can avoid that concern by using liquid castile soap, which is highly concentrated and therefore intended to be diluted. I am a fan of Dr. Bronner’s. The soap is biodegradable, free from synthetic preservatives, and has a million and one household uses. It’s available unscented, but I also enjoy the lavender, rose, and peppermint varieties. (Some people craft a scent themselves by using essential oils.) A 32-oz. bottle of Dr. Bronner’s costs about $13, but because it’s highly concentrated, it lasts a long time. I easily get 30+ refills of foaming hand soap out of one 32-oz. bottle of liquid castile soap.

Crunch those numbers and you see that you can create your own high-quality foaming hand soap for less than $0.50 per bottle.

So how do you do it?

Homemade Foaming Hand Soap

• Fill a clean foaming soap dispenser about 3/4 full with warm water.
• Add about 2 tablespoons/1 oz. (just eyeball it) of castile soap. (If you add the soap first, it will start to suds up when you try to add water, so always add it second.)
• Screw the cap on the dispenser and gently agitate it to blend the mixture. 
• Wash your hands!

That’s it. Seriously. (I told you it was easy.)