What is lye mostly used for

When working with it, the lye can damage surfaces that it comes into contact with, including your skin. Lye is sodium hydroxide. It comes in liquid form, flakes, or crystals. Sodium hydroxide comes into being when soda sodium carbonate and lime calcium hydroxide come together and cause a chemical reaction. Before you could buy lye in a bottle, people used to make it from raw materials.

They used it for tanning hides and making soap. To make lye, they would burn hardwoods at high temperatures to make white ashes. Then, they used a mixture of water and baking soda to penetrate the ashes and help remove the lye from them. Next, they filtered out the ashes. That left them with water that held enough lye to make soap and dissolve the fat from the animal hides. After all, if lye is in our soap, how bad can it be? Lye can corrode lots of things like metal, plastic, paint, cloth, and your skin.

When mixed with water, it can cause a fire. People use lye for all sorts of products that you probably use around the house every day. For instance, drain cleaners contain lye, as do paint strippers and silver polish.

But the most common use for lye is soap. For those people who like to make their own soap, they have to work with lye. Lye is a pretty serious chemical, and if you plan to use it while making soap, you would be wise to handle it cautiously.

Here are some of the precautions you should take when handling lye:. After reading about the dangers of lye, I was astonished that the product I use every day to clean myself contains it. I assumed that the natural soaps I use are good for my body and not filled with harsh chemicals.

When lye mixes with oil, it becomes soap after it saponifies. At the beginning of the soap making process, you will mix water, oil, and lye. But then you cure the soap and everything changes.

I usually just wipe up the spill with a wet rag, using gloved hands, and ring it out and rinse it, as needed, throughout the clean-up process. You could also use paper towels to clean it up and toss them in the trash afterward. Over the years, my YouTube video for my beginner soap recipe has gotten a lot of questions, comments, and some bashing because of the use of lye. All soap must use lye. Soap is the reaction of the oils with the lye.

The gloves and eye protection are to protect you when you first react the lye with the oils. Once the reaction has taken place, no lye remains and the soap works wonderfully with your skin.

I will try and link the simpler video I found. ALL soap has lye. Use whatever video you like, but know that if you are using soap, it was made with a reaction of oils to lye. It is impossible to make soap without lye. Lye is very caustic because it is very alkaline. It is not poisonous. That said, you are never using lye on your skin. You are using the lye to react with the oils to make soap in a process called saponification.

It is impossible to make soap without lye, so if you want to avoid using anything that has ever had lye in it, even though no lye is left over, avoid all soap. You should only use surfactants, but know that many of them are harsh to the skin.

You should probably also avoid most olives, soft pretzels, and some bagels as many olives are cured in lye, and many soft pretzels and bagels have been given a lye bath to give them their characteristic outside texture.

If you want to actually make soap yourself, though, you need to use lye. Melt and pour soaps have already been reacted with the lye, so, yes, you can avoid working with it by buying already made soap.

I prefer to make my own soap, though. Lye does have a lot of great uses like curing olives and giving the characteristic crust of some pretzels and bagels. They appear to be surfactant blends, so they are really more of a detergent bar than a soap. I also hope you are ready to jump in and try making your own homemade soap! Tracy Ariza, B. She loves making things herself in order to keep control of what goes in them. While far from perfect, she strives each day to live a healthier, more sustainable lifestyle.

It creates duplicate content which is bad for both of us. I made some lavender infused oil using grapeseed oil and dried lavender from my garden. It has a mild lavender scent. Will the aroma come out? Or should I used the infused oil another way? My grandmother used to make soap using Lye and used leftover cooking oil and it was not very pretty with no aroma but lathered beautifully, gentle on the skin and great for spot cleaning clothes. Hi Sofia, Yes, you can use infused oils in soap.

Some melt-and-pour soaps are true soaps with other additives to allow them to melt well lots of glycerin or propylene glycol or some other solvent. Others will be detergent-based bars. Hi, nice post…I have a question, how do you make a mild soap that is not irritating the eye? I mean for making a tear-free soap. I find out that lye is the problem.

Most of the oil is not irritating to eye, but when you add lye, even if it is a very small amount of lye, it will irritating the eye. I did a lot of experiment in skincare product…and it would be fun if we can share thoughts. I believe there must be something we can both learn from each other.

Hi Agie, I removed your contact information for your privacy. I talk more about tear-free shampoos in my baby wash and shampoo recipe. Thank you for the information! My question is whether or not it makes sense to use nice oils that will be good for the hair or skin to mix with the lye if the final product has completely different chemical properties from the initial ingredients. Would using expensive oil like castor, argan, etc. I have seen soap making videos where they use expensive oils and I am wondering if its just a waste since the oils are completely different once they have reacted with the lye.

I hope my question makes sense, thank you in advance! Hi Sarah, Yes, of course that makes sense. The interesting thing with soap is that the properties of the oils change completely in soap. So, some people add their expensive oils at the end, in the hopes that those will be the unreacted ones. I tend to save them for my homemade lotions and moisturizers instead.

Thank you, very informative page. I have some very basic questions- what exactly does the ingredient of lye do to make soap able to clean? Is it what kills the germs? Breaks up dirt? The baking soda which you use in making cakes or cookies is a weak alkali.

A strong one is sodium hydroxide NaOH which has been used as a drain cleaner. In this case, the alkali converts the grease blocking the drain into soap which allows you to flush it away. All soap is simply just that, an alkali salt of fatty acids.

In soap making, all the lye is consumed in the saponification process and no residual remains. The modern soap making process has been revolutionized by artisans, using only the best and most nourishing fatty acids olive oil for example to create healthy, moisturizing, skin loving bars.

Sodium hydroxide NaOH is made using the chloralkali process. Today lye is made by passing an electrical current through a sodium chloride NaCl solution. Through the use of a special membrane, the resulting NaOH lye solution is allowed to exit the cell and be collected while the other products remain behind.

The lye is further reduced and sold in flakes, beads or pellet form. Industrial lye is used where the primary interest is caustic power. It is used in the manufacture of textiles, paper and detergents. Some common household products that use lye are oven and drain cleaners.