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Impressive looking, but simple enough for beginners, this easy pumpkin spice soap smells divine, and would make a perfect autumn gift.
Now that autumn has finally arrived, along with its cooler nights and shorter days, I’m already thinking about Halloween and Thanksgiving and all of the pumpkin and apple spice recipes that accompany them.
Last year, around this time, I had begun playing with making different types of soaps, and had a great idea for making an easy pumpkin spice soap, but couldn’t find the ingredients, mainly some spice essential oils, that I wanted to use anywhere nearby. I figured that if I ordered them online, pumpkin spice soap time would have already passed by the time that I could actually use the soap. My reasoning? While the saponification process, the process in which all of the lye and oils have chemically combined and made soap, completes within the first few days after making soap, you should wait a few weeks, for your soap to harden, before you actually use it. Otherwise the soap will be soft and will get used up too quickly.
This year, though, I’m better prepared. I bought the oils that I wanted to use to spice up my soap, and made a lovely soap with pumpkin and goat milk to bring in autumn.
Pumpkin and goat milk both add a little color to the soap, and they also add some hydration and richness. As for the spices, I chose to use both the dried spices themselves and the essential oils. The spices add a dark color to the soap, along with a beautiful aroma, and also add a very mild exfoliation. While I love this soap, and the way it smells, it is worth mentioning that the spices and their oils may be irritating for some people with sensitive skin.
If you have never made soap before, don’t worry. This soap is very simple to make. I purposely based this soap recipe on my beginner soap recipe. My beginner soap is a tried and true recipe that only uses simple, easy to find oils, and has a relatively long working time, so you should have plenty of time to add in your oils, spices, and can try to swirl them together like I did. Because you are working with milk, and are swirling two parts of the soap together, it is a bit more complicated than the other recipe. So, if you are nervous about it, begin with the other recipe. If you are adventurous, though, give this one a try! If you follow the directions carefully, even as a beginner, you shouldn’t have any problems.
As with all soap recipes, be very careful when working with lye and solutions using it!
Use protective eyewear and gloves, and mix your lye into your water, and not the other way around! It’s also a good idea to mix the ingredients outside or in a well ventilated area. You can read more tips on my beginner soap recipe.
OK, with all of that said, let’s make some easy pumpkin spice soap!!
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Easy Pumpkin Spice Soap
Materials
- 100 g sweet almond oil 3.5 oz.
- 100 g coconut oil 3.5 oz.
- 400 g olive oil 14.1 oz.
- 80 g lye 2.8 oz.
- 100 ml goat milk either fresh or reconstituted from powdered
- 100 ml water
- 45 g pumpkin 1.6 oz., I made my own puree
- 1 tsp. coconut sugar or any brown sugar
- 1 tsp. salt
- 1 Tbsp. cinnamon
- 1 tsp. nutmeg
- 1 tsp. ground cloves
- clove essential oil & cinnamon and ginger essential oils
Instructions
- Mix together the water and goat milk. Then make your lye solution by adding the lye into the mixture of water and goat milk. Because adding lye causes the temperature to rise quickly, to prevent the milk from scalding, mix them together over a pan of ice and water. I also froze the goat milk, just to be sure, but if you are careful about mixing over ice, that shouldn't be necessary. Your solution will probably turn slightly orange-yellow; that is a normal reaction of goat milk and lye.
- Once your solution is thoroughly mixed, allow it to rest while you get together your other ingredients. We want the heating and cooling process to complete before adding the lye solution into the oils.
- Mix together your almond, coconut, and olive oil in a large bowl.
- Prepare your molds by oiling them. You don't need to use professional soap molds. My favorite mold is a silicone loaf pan, but I have also successfully used plastic food containers.
- Add the sugar and salt to the lye solution.
- Add the lye solution to the oil mixture, and gently mix them together.
- Once you have the lye solution incorporated into the oils, you can begin to carefully mix them together with a hand blender. While you can do this part by hand, it would take much longer. We are looking to have the mixture thicken up like mayonnaise. If your lye mixture is cold when you begin mixing them, it will take a little longer to get the mixture to thicken. That will give you a little extra working time, too, if you are new to soap making.
- Partway through the mixing process, begin to mix in the pumpkin pureé.
- Now is the time to add in the essential oils or you can use fragrance oils, if you prefer. Certain essential oils, like clove oil, will cause your soap to thicken much more quickly, so be prepared, just in case. The amount of oil you add will depend a lot upon the oils you use, and your personal taste for how fragrant you want your soap to be. I added in somewhere between 5-10ml of oils overall, using mostly clove essential oil, a little less cinnamon, and a little less ginger, because that is my order of preference for those oils. You can experiment here, and use your nose to help guide you. 😉 If you are using a pumpkin spice blend, it may have vanilla, which will darken your soap, so you may choose to add it to only the half of your soap with the spice mixture.
- Once you start to get to a mayonnaise like texture, separate out ⅓ to ½ of your mixture. You will be adding your spices to part of your soap, creating a swirled soap with two different colors. Add in your spices to the ⅓ to ½ that you separated out.
- Begin to pour about half of the un-spiced soap into your molds.
- Add a layer of the spiced soap, followed by the rest of the un-spiced, and finishing up with the rest of the spiced soap.
- Using a spoon or some other utensil, poke into the soaps, reaching for the bottom layer and pulling the soap out over top, trying to gently swirl the soaps in certain places. You can also zigzag your way through the soap in places, to have the soaps gently swirl together, without mixing them into each other.
- Once you are happy with your swirling, allow the soap to rest for at least 24 hours. Your soap will heat up during this time. After 24 hours, you can begin to check on your soap to see if it can be gently unmolded. If it is too soft, wait another day or two and check on it again. Gently unfold it as soon as you can, and cut your bars into your desired shapes.
- Let your soap continue to set, dry out, and harden for about a month. To help the process, turn your soap every couple of days.
- Enjoy using it! It smells wonderful!!
Don’t want to use goat milk? Just switch it for another 100ml of water.
I love this soap, and think it would make a great present for someone this fall, especially given in a beautiful soap saver exfoliating bag. You could buy one, or maybe we’ll just have to make one someday soon. 😉
Too many ideas, too little time…
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I tried your basic soap recipe and the results are curing now. Excited! I’m wondering, when you have time, could you please post on different ways to colour soap? Then I can just combine that with the basic recipe and then gift it to people. Thanks for all your great recipes!
Hi Anita,
Awesome! Waiting for the first batch is always the most exciting! 🙂
Sure- it’s something I’d definitely like to do.
I’m planning on reorganizing and fixing up my whole soap making section this fall, and that’s definitely one idea I had. I can definitely make it more of a priority now that I know that there is interest.
I did some experimentation with coloring with spices and completely natural colorings, but would also like to give more options that include iron oxides and micas.
I also want to add another recipe to this post that includes more coconut oil to make it harder and lather more.
I personally love this recipe, but some people want a really hard, more cleansing bar so I’d like to give another option for those who don’t mind having a shorter working time.
Can I use tap water instead of distilled water?
Hi Lisa,
While it’s normally fine, I say to use distilled water because the tap water in some areas will have impurities that can interfere with the soap or make it so that it doesn’t keep as well. If somebody has issues with a recipe, I like to be able to rule out the tap water as a source of the issue. 😉
I started reading this site in the hope that I could learn to make soap which did not incorporate palm oil. I was horrified to read the comments about using palm oil as an ingredient.
Before you use palm oil: please can everyone watch this You tube video about Rang Tan? https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/what-we-do/forests/rang-tan/
Hi Suzette,
Sure, there are many wonderful soaps that don’t use palm oil! In fact, I’ve actually never used it in soap making. I don’t recall the comments you are talking about, but it’s still an ingredient I haven’t used. I think it’s very good to raise awareness about the problems in the palm industry. I will say, though, that it’s almost impossible to avoid all products that use palm. I buy in an Eco Supermarket that claims to have no palm products, but then they do have surfactants in their natural cleaning section and most items don’t specifiy which surfactants have been used. Many people aren’t aware that most of the more natural surfactants do have some palm in their origin. (And, of course, surfactants are just about everywhere.) I’m going to assume that they are probably selling many products sourced from palm without realizing it.
While not perfect, there are palm certifications so that you can make sure that the ingredients used are as sustainable as possible, which is what I look for when sourcing any surfactants that may have some palm in them.
there are also humans that depend on palm oil to survive. do your research before we put animals before human life and sustainability
Thanks Zzzz
I’m Nigerian and major edible oil is palm.
My soaps use 6o-80%palm and they are great!
When people blast palm oil it makes me laugh because in my research about this, most of ‘their’ processed foods have palm in disguised forms. Plus the fact that we don’t have orang-utangs here and most other places that produce palm and it’s products.
Using one place/situation to blast an entire plant produce is highly ridiculous!
Hi Excelle,
I think the problem with palm is that the demand got high and us “outsiders” came in and started to exploit it.
I don’t think most people would be against someone in an area that has always used palm continue to use it in a responsible way.
I think a lot of people avoid using palm because they don’t want to contribute to that exploitation.
While I don’t eat processed foods normally, so I don’t really probably ingest palm oil (although I don’t have a problem with non-hydrogenized palm health-wise), Many (most?) surfactants have some palm in them somewhere in the process. I try to always make sure that mine have been marked as being sustainably sourced with certification.
I guess it’s up to each of us to use what we feel comfortable with. I don’t avoid palm 100% (nor do most people who think they do. 😉 ), but I try to make sure I find from sustainable sources. (That doesn’t just apply to palm.)
I’m sure palm makes a lovely soap. I love coconut oil for soap, and I’d assume they would behave in a very similar way.
Thank you for this recipe! I have been wanting to make my own soap for quite some time. Your recipe was the first I tried and it came out AMAZING! At first I thought the clove scent was too strong but after 6 weeks of curing, it is perfect!
Hi Vanessa,
Thank you so much! (And thank you for letting me know how it turned out!) I’m so happy to hear it turned out well for you!
Yes, fragrances definitely mellow with time, and in most cases, with natural scents, it’s hard to get them to stay around. Luckily these tend to be pretty fragrant and last well.
Hi! This may sound like a dumb question, Im from the Philippines and I wonder when you you said to dry out the soap, do you mean just indoors? It gets really hot out here and I’m thinking if i left it out under the sun, will that help in making it cure faster? Thank you so much!
Hi Trixie,
I dry mine indoors.
I’m not sure what would happen in the sun, but you wouldn’t really lower the cure time just by having it dry more quickly. The cure time is partly about drying time, but it is also about giving the crystalline structure of the soap time to restructure itself.
In any case, you are able to use the soap before then- it just will improve with time.
After a few days, normally the saponification process will have finished, so it’s safe to use your soap soon after having made it. It’s all about allowing it to improve. That doesn’t mean that you can’t use it earlier if you are feeling impatient. 😉
Hi Tracy,
Your soaps are wonderful and very inspirational!
In your recipe you call for 100ml of water and not distilled water. does it matter if it is distilled or not when it comes to adding milk to the recipe?
Hi Giselle,
I should probably update the recipe and say to use distilled water. When I first made soaps- including this soap, I only used our filtered water for drinking, and I never had any problems. In most cases, you can use regular filtered water for making bar soaps. The problem is that some people will have water that will have certain minerals or other substances that may give unwanted reactions or that “contaminate” the soap in some way or another.
I normally like to say to use distilled water, mostly just to be able to rule out any problems like that if the person is having issues.
So, while in most cases, it’s OK to use regular water, I still feel better about using distilled when possible.