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The Economics of making your own Foaming Soap: 13¢ per bottle

You might have read that you can make your own foaming soap from regular liquid hand soap. You just add water to liquid hand soap, let it settle, and then those foaming dispensers can pump it exactly like the stuff you buy from the store. But what are the economics of it? That's what this posting is all about.

Liquid Hand Soap Bottles
Liquid Soap with my "custom mix" bottle

To make foaming soap, I mix 32 ounces of water with 8 ounces of liquid soap, resulting in 40 ounces of foaming soap. That means each unit of liquid soap turns into 5 units of foaming soap.

Therefore, my 56 ounce bottle of liquid soap becomes 280 ounces of foaming soap.

What is the cost? Here you are:

Store foaming handsoap..: 19.60¢ per fluid ounce
Store liquid handsoap...:  7.66¢ per fluid ounce
My home foaming handsoap:  1.53¢ per fluid ounce

The Economic Conclusion

All this means that my $4.29 jug of liquid soap can be turned into $54.90 worth of foaming soap. Yes, the store bought foaming soap is 13 times as expensive as mixing my own foaming soap. Why does store bought foaming soap cost so much? Likely some of it is because packaging and shipping a lot of water is a real expense.

Furthermore, mixing my own foaming soap uses ONE instead of TEN disposable soap packages.

Don't have time for this? You're nuts.

Other Ideas

Some people have other ideas, like adding essential oils. What are essential oils? These oils are not "essential" from the "needed for human life" perspective. Instead, they are "escential" from the perspective of "they have a scent", and can be dangerous when applied to the skin. See this article on Essential Oil for more information.

Soaps work by binding the dirty and sticky oils on your skin with water, and so adding oil to your soap is wasting its ability to clean. Eventually all the oil goes down the drain, and some of the odors go into your nose. So basically my policy is to never add any oil to soap, as oil makes soap far less effective, and it results in more oil waste, and results in higher costs. Adding essential oils to soap is, at best, a useless and wasteful practice.

Anyone promoting the addition of oil to soap is looking to sell you something, or doesn't know or care about the toxicity risks of essential oils on human skin.

Update: Now even better!

I decided to experiment with my formula and tried a 5:1 ratio of water to soap.  It works just as well!

Now the math is even more impressive: One ounce of liquid soap at 7.66¢ becomes six ounces of foaming soap at 1.28¢ per fluid ounce... or 13¢ to refill my 10 ounce pump bottle.  That's like a 93% discount!  Wow!  Maybe I'll try a 6:1 ratio next time.


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