How to Make Foaming Soap - DIY Homemade Hand Soap (2025)

I'm going to go into this assuming you know foaming soap is a rip off. You know that, right? You pay the same or more for foaming soap & for that you get - less soap and more water. Here's how to make your own diy foaming hand soap.

Skip right to the tutorial.

It's the little things in life that get me all riled up and in a good mood. Remembering I have leftover pizza in the fridge, watching squirrels scurrying around trying to find hiding places for their nuts in the fall, finding out Home Depot now carries the 2" galvanized pipe elbows with a double sided, screw in end. You know. The little things.

Foaming soap is one of those little things. I love it. It's easy. It comes out puffy and lathery without any work on your part at all.

That's right. I'll spend 12 hours stacking 2 full, bush cords of wood, but I'm too lazy to lather.

What of it?

The one thing I don't like about foaming soap dispensers is refill soap for them is harder to find than regular soap and is usually more expensive. Even though you're getting less soap.

wheras

That means a 500 ml bottle of foaming soap refill is 20% soap and 80% water.

So I figured out how to turn regular liquid hand soap into the sort of soap that will work in a foaming dispenser. This winter I even made my own Frasier Fir scented foaming handsoap using Frasier Fir essential oil and The Unscented Company soap refill.

Regular liquid hand soap won't work in a foaming dispenser because it's too thick.

So genius me decided I could probably just add water to it to thin it down.

Genius me was right.

Getting the proportions right isn't even difficult. It's pretty forgiving. It's foaming soap, not an atomic bomb.

Can You make Your Own Foaming Hand Soap?

You CAN indeed make your own foaming hand soap. But for the soap to foam you need a special foaming soap dispenser. If you've ever bought a foaming soap that's in a dispenser this technique will work in it.

Mrs. Meyers (not a sponsored post) even has a foaming soap kit with a glass foaming dispenser, and 2, 2 ounce bottles of refill soap. Just add water.

What Makes Foaming Soap Foam?

The reason the soap foams has nothing to do with the actual soap. It's the way the soap is dispensed. Foaming dispensers add air to the soap as you push down on the foaming pump. If you take a look at your foaming soap dispenser you'll see the soap is held in the main chamber, and then attached to the pump there's a smaller chamber. It's that chamber that forces air into the soap as you pump it out.

Is it Better Than Regular Soap?

Aside from the fun of having your soap being pre-foamed for you, foaming soap is actually better in many ways than regular liquid soap. Here's how:

• People use less soap when dispensing it from a foaming dispenser. This makes it more economical and means that foaming soap lasts longer.
• People use 15% less water to lather with foaming soap so that's less water use which is environmentally friendly. If you only use water to rinse your hands and don't add water for the initial hand washing, using foaming soap will save 45% of the water used during traditional hand washing.
• Using foaming hand soap reduces the amount of soap you use for each hand washing which in turn means you get more hand washes out of each package. This means you're reducing the amount of packaging used.

How to Make Foaming Soap

1. Mix 1 part liquid soap with 4-6 parts water in a foaming soap dispenser.
2. Slowly mix by gently turning soap dispenser until incorporated.

The higher ratio of water you use the more cost savings you'll have but the less foamy the soap will be.

You can use any foaming soap dispenser you have and any liquid soap.

But if you plan on doing this a lot I'd recommend getting a nice, heavy glass foaming soap dispenser.

I like this black glass dispenser. It's solid and heavy, so when you're down to the last bit of soap your dispenser won't flip over or tip like the lightweight plastic dispensers sometimes (always) do.

To mix the water into the soap you just have to do it slowly and gently. Just tip the container back and forth slowly until the water is incorporated with the soap.

I wasn't even going to do this tutorial because it's so logical and so easy but I thought the same thing when I did a post on How to Peel a Peach. I figured everyone knew how to do that to and as it turned out … they didn't.

If the screw top of your foaming dispenser fits other jars with a screw on lid that are more attractive, then you could attach it to that the same way I did in this billion year old post Pouring spouts and Bottles.

If your foaming dispenser screw top is an odd size then you can just slip the whole thing into a nicer container so it's hidden. If you can be bothered. My dispenser actually fits into a black ceramic vase perfectly. It would have been great if I'd taken a photo of it. But I didn't. Cause I'm not quite as geniusy as we thought just a few paragraphs ago.

And that's it to DIY foaming hand soap. That is all it takes to make me happy. Soap that self lathers and having a brain large enough to figure out how to make it myself.

Which in terms of brain size puts me right up there with your average nut hiding squirrel.