This homemade rosemary vanilla soap recipe smells divine, and leaves your skin super soft and clean. Your whole family will love it!
One of the things I love most about making homemade soap is that I get to make small batch, after small batch, and change up the essential oils that I use to make them smell amazing depending on my mood.
None of that boring old buying the same bar of soap off the shelf in a box at the drug store – or however you buy it. Honestly, it’s been about eight years since I bought a bar of soap – I even carried bars of soap with us to Argentina a few years ago. ????
Over the course of those years, I’ve developed a list of our favorite blends, which you can find here —> essential oil blends recipes for soap making. But that doesn’t stop me from changing things up and dreaming up the next best blend to try.
And it shouldn’t stop you either.
When the inspiration strikes, just write it down until you get a chance to pull your oils and and give them a sniff.
Don’t have time to make your own soap? Buy it here!
My favorite method for making soap is the cold process method. Sure, it takes three weeks to cure, but if you’ve got time to wait, it makes a beautiful, silky-smooth bar of soap when it’s finished.
On the other hand, if you need soap right now, hot process soap can be done in one afternoon. You can still use the same oils and botanicals, but you’ll just add them in at the very end of the soaping process right before you mold the soap.
Either way, you’ll love the combined scent of rosemary and vanilla – bright, and soothing at the same time. So good!
Since there is no true vanilla essential oil (though you can certainly find vanilla essence oil on amazon), we’re using vanilla beans in this recipe to compliment the rustic botanical aesthetic of the rosemary.
P.S. Aren’t the labels for these soap bars cute? Click here to get the free printable templates.
Homemade Rosemary Vanilla Soap Recipe
Ingredients:
- 6 oz distilled water
- 2.2 oz. lye
- 5 oz olive oil
- 5 oz. coconut oil
- 6 oz. palm or canola oil
- 10 ml rosemary essential oil
- 2 vanilla beans, scraped
- 3 Tablespoons chopped, dried rosemary leaves
Instructions:
- Tip: you will want a digital read out food scale for the most accurate results as using liquid measuring cups results in varying results)
- Mix lye and water together until lye beads or crystals have dissolved
- Allow to cool again to between 120-130º (a great tool for instantly measuring your soaping temperatures is an infrared instant read thermometer)
- Combine oils and heat to about 120º as well
- When all your ingredients are relatively close in temperature, it’s time to mix them together!
- You can either mix vigorously with a spoon for as long as 45 minutes, or use a stick blender to pulse and stir – which should take about 6-8 minutes
- Either way, stir until your soap mixture reaches a trace (you can read more about soap tracing here)
- Add essential oil, and vanilla bean paste
- Sprinkle rosemary leaves into the bottom of your soap mold
- Pour soap into prepared molds, and cover
- Set your soap away in a safe place for a few days to let it set up and harden.
- After that, you can uncover your soap, and cut it into bars if you used a loaf type mold
- Put your soap back away in a safe place, and continue to let it cure for three weeks.
- That’s it! After three weeks, you soap is ready to use.
- Note: This is a cold process soap making method. You can read instructions here on how to make hot process soap, which can be used right away here (you can use these ingredients in place of the ones called for).
- Enjoy!
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