If you love making cold process soap and want to take your designs to the next level, soap dough is a must-try! This pliable, moldable soap can be shaped into beautiful embeds like flowers, leaves, animals, and intricate designs that harden into solid soap over time. Whether you’re looking to add eye-catching details to your bars or enjoy sculpting fun creations, my easy soap dough recipe is a fantastic addition to your soap-making toolkit.

In this guide, I’ll show you how to make soap dough step by step. It’s easy, fun, and allows you to get super creative with your soap designs. Let’s get started!

What is Soap Dough?

Soap dough is a special type of cold process soap that stays soft and moldable instead of hardening immediately. It’s perfect for:

• Creating soap embeds – Add decorative elements like flowers, stars, or swirls inside your soap bars.
• Hand-sculpting unique designs – Make detailed shapes such as leaves, animals, or even mini soap figurines.
• Personalizing your soaps – Customize your soap bars with letters, numbers, or textured patterns.

The best part? Once your soap dough is shaped, it hardens over time into a solid, usable soap!

How to Make Soap Dough

Tools You’ll Need

Check out The Ultimate Soapmaking Supply Checklist here for a complete beginner-friendly list of must-have supplies. If you’re new to making cold process soap, you probably have many tools in your kitchen that can be repurposed for your new soap dough hobby. Just remember—once you use them for soap, keep them dedicated to soap-making only!

• Scale
• Stick Blender
• Mixing Bowl
• Spatula
• Solo Cups
• Ziplock Baggies
• PPE: Gloves, Apron, Eye Protection, Long Sleeves

Soap Dough Recipe:

This easy soap dough recipe uses just three simple oils—olive oil, coconut oil, and cocoa butter. It’s completely vegan and yields a little over 15 ounces (433 grams), making it perfect for adding decorative touches to cold process soap or creating embeds for unique designs. Feel free to adjust the batch size to fit your needs! You can use my handy lye calculator here to customize your recipe.

• 95 Grams Coconut Oil
• 175 Grams Olive Oil
• 25 Grams Cocoa Butter
• 100 Grams Distilled Water
• 41.75 Grams Sodium Hydroxide (Lye)
• Mica Powder

Prepare the Lye Solution

Put on your gloves, goggles and apron on for safety. Slowly pour the lye into the ice cubes made from distilled water (note: Never pour water into lye, always pour lye into water). Stir gently until all the ice melts and the lye is fully dissolved.

Mix the Oils & Lye

Melt the coconut oil, cocoa butter, and olive oil together. I like to melt the fats in the microwave in 30 second increments. Let both the lye solution and oils cool to about 100°F.

Pour the lye solution into the oils and blend with a stick blender until it reaches a light trace (a thin pudding-like texture).

Add Color & Let It Set

Divide the soap batter into containers based on how many colors you want. Add mica powder or other colorants directly into each portion and stick blend until combined.

Cover the containers with plastic, so they are fully covered and sealed tightly and let the soap sit overnight to saponify (fully turn into soap).

Knead the Soap Dough

After 12–24 hours, your soap dough should have a Play-Doh-like consistency. If it still seems sticky, cover and give it more time to set up.

Remove the soap dough from the container and start kneading. If the dough is too sticky, let it sit out for a bit longer before working with it.

Once smooth and silky, it’s ready to use! Some recipes say to use corn starch if the dough is sticky. With this recipe, I have never had a problem with the dough being too sticky, but corn starch is an option.

How to Use Soap Dough

Soap dough is super versatile! Here are some creative ways to use it:

Soap Embeds: Roll small shapes and embed them into fresh cold process soap for unique patterns.

Sculpted Designs: Shape leaves, flowers, or fun figures to decorate your soap bars. I love painting the soap dough with a dusting of mica.

How to Store Soap Dough

Once shaped, your soap dough will harden over time into regular soap. Just as you do with regular cold process soap, let the soap dough cure for a few weeks before use. To keep any leftover soap dough soft and moldable for future projects, store it in plastic baggies inside an airtight container. I usually use my soap dough within a week to ensure it stays pliable. While I have stored some for much longer, I prefer to err on the side of caution.

If you’re looking for the perfect match for my soap dough recipe, grab my free cold process soap recipe booklet here—the best base for creating stunning handmade soaps!

Making soap dough is a fun and creative way to customize your cold process soaps. Whether you want to add intricate details or create playful designs, this easy technique allows you to bring your soap-making skills to the next level.

Have you tried making soap dough before? Let me know in the comments! And if you found this guide helpful, don’t forget to share it with fellow soapmakers or pin it on Pinterest here.

Happy soaping!