How To Make Shower Gel Using Natural Surfactants – Recipe Without Lye

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Here’s how to make DIY shower gel, you can whip this up at home and use it in minutes. I’m using mild, natural, and easy-to-use surfactants, that are suitable for even the most sensitive of skins.

I love liquid soap. I recently rediscovered how much fun it is to make! However, there is one problem, it takes so long to make! It’s a lot like a traditional soap-making method in that way. But surely there’s an easier way to whip up a bottle of my favorite smelling liquid soap? There is, using natural surfactants!

Watch How To Make Shower Gel

Super easy diy shower gel

Introduction

While I know surfactants have earned a bit of a dirty name over the last few decades, stay with me here. Natural surfactants are readily available nowadays. No need to use that awful SLSA powder anymore! 

This recipe makes a perfect homemade shower gel and can be adapted to suit your own needs. However, if this is your first time making soap with surfactants I’d advise sticking to the recipe below. No need to fix what isn’t broken, you know? Experimentation can come later.

Ingredients I’ll be Using For This DIY Shower Gel

Most of the ingredients I’ve chosen for my shower gel recipe are simple, fairly inexpensive, and easy to source. I’m using distilled water rather than a hydrosol (floral water) and reasonably priced essential oils. The essential oils can, of course, be substituted for another blend or even a fragrance oil if your budget is really tight.

Funny thing is, most store-bought shampoos, shower gels, and bubble baths are made using this method. Manufacturing traditional lye-based liquid soap is expensive and time-consuming, so it makes sense. Until the synthetic ingredients in them start to irritate your skin!

So I say enough of the store-bought stuff. We can save time and money by mimicking what the big players in skincare do, but spend a little more time making sure our skin gets the tender love and care it really needs. Let’s take back control of our skincare! But first, let’s chat about the ingredients we’re using today.

Surfactants

Step 2: Weigh out the coco glucoside and add the essential oils, stir slowly to prevent foaming

There are tons of reasons why you may prefer to use a surfactant to create your liquid soap. Chief among these is that it only takes around 20 minutes to knock up a fantastic cleansing shower gel. It also cuts out the risk of handling the lye (potassium hydroxide).

Lye is a super-strong alkali, but it is necessary if you want to make liquid soap from scratch the old fashioned way. But it can be an intimidating ingredient for an inexperienced formulator. Surfactants allow us to bypass this ingredient and this method entirely.

I like to think of surfactants in the same way you would a melt and pour soap base, only you need to add things to them to be able to use it. A bit of distilled water, a sprinkle of a thickening cosmetic gum, and a dash of a humectant are all you’ll need to do this.

The surfactant I’m using in my pink grapefruit shower gel is coco glucoside. It’s totally accepted in natural skincare formulation, is one of the mildest and easiest to work with and gives a good lather. So basically, it ticks all my boxes. If you are unable to get hold of it you can substitute it for Caprylyl/Capryl Glucoside or Plantapon TF. Any of these will work well.    

Cosmetic Gum

Step 4: Add the gum to the glycerine

A cosmetic gum, in this case xanthan Gum, is used to thicken our shower gel. It can be a bit tricky to use and needs to be blended into the glycerine thoroughly, otherwise you may end up with white specks floating in the gel.

Humectant

how make green tea and cucumber eye gel step 3: In a seperate beaker, add the glycerine

A humectant is an ingredient used in skincare that draws moisture to a product once it’s applied to the skin, leading to lovely skin-softening benefits.

I’m using glycerine in this recipe. It’s readily available and probably the easiest to use. I add it to lots of my products, as it really helps to plump out the skin and make it appear and feel much more supple.

Apart from all the obvious benefits to the skin, the glycerine keeps everything nice and slick, helping the gel to glide easily and evenly across the skin. It also has a way of helping the xanthan gum dissolve quicker, making the whole process a little easier.

Essential Oils

Essential oils make amazing bath oils on their own

This diy shower gel has a lovely aroma that smells fresh and citrusy. It really smells amazing in the shower! The grapefruit and bergamot essential oils also have great cleansing and antibacterial properties. Both are excellent stress-relieving oils that can help to balance your mood and energize the mind. Great for your morning shower!

Preservative

how to make a natural face moisturizer: Add your preservative using a pipette
Add your preservative using a pipette

As this is a water-based product, it absolutely needs a preservative. A simple broad-spectrum preservative at around 0.05-1% should do the job.  If you are using an oil-based preservative it will need to be added to the surfactant after incorporating the essential oils (see step 2).

A water-based one should be added later in step 5. If you are not sure you can test your preservative by stirring a little into some water to see if it floats around the top (oil-based) or disburses into the water (water-based)    

Something To Note

Okay, one more thing to keep in mind (I promise) before we make a start. The essential oils must be added to the Coco-Glucoside first.

The surfactant works as a solubilizer to absorb the essential oils so that they can be mixed with the remaining water-based ingredients.

If you were to add them at the end, they will separate and float around the top just as they would if you were to drop them into water.   

Super easy diy shower gel

How To Make Shower Gel At Home Without Lye

My super easy diy shower gel recipe that you can whip up and use at home in literally minutes. I'm using mild, natural, and easy to use surfactants that are suitable for even the most sensitive of skins. 

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5 from 14 votes
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Prep Time: 5 minutes
Active Time: 20 minutes
Total Time: 25 minutes
Yield: 200 grams (aprox)
Difficulty Level: Easy
Author: Angela Wills

As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. If you buy via the links here I may earn a small affiliate commission at no cost to you.

Ingredients

Instructions

  • Place the glycerine into a jug or beaker, then add the xanthan gum to it. Mix well until the xanthan gum has completely dissolved into the glycerine.
    20 grams Glycerine, 2 grams Xanthan Gum
    Step 1: Add the glycerine and xanthan gum to a beaker and stir thoroughly
  • Weigh the coco glucoside into a small beaker and add the essential oils. You will need to stir the coco glucoside to fully disperse the essential oils within it. This needs to be done carefully so to prevent unwanted foaming.
    If you are using an oil-based preservative you will also need to add and blend this in now. A water-based preservative should be added later in step 5.
    25 grams Coco Glucoside, 0.5 grams Grapefruit Essential Oil, 0.5 grams Bergamot Essential Oil
    Step 2: Weigh out the coco glucoside and add the essential oils, stir slowly to prevent foaming
  • Pour the coco glucoside into the glycerine and gum mixture. Once again you will need to make sure you combine this well, whilst being careful not to foam up the surfactant too much.
    Step 3: Add the surfactant/essential oil mixture to the glycerine/xanthan gum and stir slowly to prevent foaming
  • Whilst stirring, slowly add the distilled water to the gum mixture. Stir gently until it has fully combined and has thickened.
    150 grams Distilled Water
    Step 4: Add the distilled water to the mixture and stir slowly to prevent foaming. Liquid soap dye should also be added at this stage
  • Once the gel is nice and thick, stir in the preservative then add a couple of drops of liquid soap coloring (if using).
    2 grams Preservative, Liquid Soap Dye
    Step 5: Add the preservative and stir slowly to prevent foaming
  • Coco glucoside can have a high PH level so it's good to test your shower gel using a PH strip. This needs to fall slightly onto the acidic side with a range of between 4 and 6. If it’s a little too high, you can use a PH modifier to bring it down. You can use Lactic acid or Citic acid.
    To test the PH, dip one of your universal indicator strips into your body wash mixture. Compare this to the scale that comes with your strips. If it’s a little too high, you can add a couple of drops of lactic acid to bring it down.
    If you are using citric acid as a PH modifier, it will need to be diluted in a solution of 10% citric acid to 90% distilled water. Make sure to add small amounts at a time and then test again, repeating until you reach a reasonable PH. You don't want to risk wasting your entire batch by adding too much of your PH modifier.
    Because this recipe contains a surfactant, it is highly unlikely that your body wash will test lower than a 4 on the PH scale, so don’t worry too much about needing to raise it.
    PH Modifier
    Step 6: Test the PH level of your soap, it should be slightly acidic between 4 and 6. Add lactic acid to lower it and bicarbonate of soda to increase it
  • Transfer to a PET plastic bottle with pump or screw cap lid to store. Keep out of direct sunlight, especially if your bottle is clear plastic.
    1 Pump Bottle
    Step 7: Transfer to a PET plastic bottle with a pump or screw cap lid

Notes

This homemade shower gel contains a preservative so should last around 9 Months
Category: DIY Bath & Body
Cuisine: N/A
Difficulty: Easy

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Final Thoughts

As I mentioned before, this is a great starter shower gel recipe that can help you master how to make liquid soap using simple surfactants. There are loads of surfactants on the market that all bring something valuable or new like extra foaming, creaminess, cleansing, or emulsifying. So feel free to tinker with it once you become more confident. 

There are other ways to customize your shower gel. Perhaps you could use a hydrosol instead of water? Peppermint hydrosol and peppermint essential are a great combination for some much needed morning invigoration.

The bottom line is that this doesn’t have to be just ordinary when you can make it extraordinary!        

Discussion (62 Comments)

  1. Hi Angela, I’ve followed the recipe and love the feel – however it doesn’t lather much, especially in the shower – can you advise what the best way to go about getting it to lather more? Thanks so much!

    Reply
    • Hi Blair,

      I find if I don’t think something feels foamy enough, I’ll add a bit of cocamidopropyl betaine. It’s a great little co-surfactant that’ll help improve the flash foam power of the product. But don’t add too much or you’ll end up with something more like bubble bath. Replace 10g of the distilled water with 10 grams of the cocamidopropyl betaine.

      Reply
  2. Hi Angela,

    I’m very new to this and I’ve been reading through your different articles about liquid soap. If I understand correctly, when using a premade organic castile soap base, I’d just need to play around with essential oils/fragrances, glycerin, preservatives, and that’s it, correct? Since the premade castile soap base would contain Surfactants, or would I have to add this in separately? I’m getting my confusion from when I take a look at the recipes/directions you’ve posted with https://www.savvyhomemade.com/liquid-soap-base-recipes/ under the “Super Easy Body Wash” & “Rose Body Wash” sections.

    My purpose is to provide insight, is to learn how to do this and potentially open a side business selling body care products, so any input is appreciated.

    Thank you for sharing your wisdom!

    Reply
    • Hi Athan,

      If you buy a liquid soap base, you’re absolutely right all you’d need to do is add your additional ingredients to customize it (e.g. pigments, essential oils, fragrance oils etc). It will, of course, depends on the base you’ve bought. Sometimes these require you to add water, but not all. Make sure to read all the manufacturer/supplier guidelines before beginning.

      In regards to making soaps with surfactants, this is a different method of soap making and not relavent for use with a soap base, so don’t worry. Your surfactants are already in your soap base.

      Hope this has given you some more insight, and I wish you all the luck with your new business venture!
      – Angela

      Reply
  3. Hi Angela,
    I made this and it lathers well and smells wonderful but is a bit lumpy. do you have any recommendations?

    Thank you!

    Reply
    • Hi Jennifer,

      Lumpy you say? This is quite unusual! What form of surfactant are you using? Is it liquid or solid? The only other thing I could think of is perhaps too much xanthan gum has been used, or it has not been properly dissolved into the glycerine first.

      Reply
    • Hi Heidi,

      Unfortunately not with this recipe. As this one is made with surfactants, it doesn’t go through SAP (Saponification). So this is a completely different kind of soap, that aren’t really relevant to each other.

      Reply
    • Hi Joi,

      Yes I’m fairly certain you can, but I haven’t tried this myself. You’d need to do a bit of experimenting. Start with a little and work from there. It’ll likely change the consistency of your shower gel. You could consider making an emulsified cream body wash, which is ultra-luxurious and made in a similar way, with just a few extra steps.

      Reply
  4. Ph level for mine was around 5 (I used cocamidopropyl betaine and decyl glycoside rather than coco glucoside). Looks like this shower gel could also be used as a “basic” shampoo?

    Reply
    • Hi Beth,

      Yeah sure it can! I can’t say it would be particularly good for your hair, but it most definitely will get it clean. This is useful when you’re running out of your regular shampoo.

      Reply
      • Thank you so much! I’m wondering if I can mess around with this a bit and perhaps add Panthenol…I know it’s a humectant, so perhaps working with that and glycerine…I like the idea of perhaps adding honey as well.

        Reply
  5. Hello Angela,
    Thanks for sharing your recipe. I would like to mod ify and add tumeric and honey. At what step do I add these?
    Thanks

    Reply
    • Hi Jojo,

      That’s a lovely idea! Tumeric and honey are wonderful additions to your liquid surfactant soaps.

      As for how to add these, I think there’s only really one good way to go about it. Because honey and glycerine are both humectants, you should be fine substituting half (or even all) of the glycerine for your honey. A combination of both would be heavenly, so I advise using 10g honey and 10g glycerine.

      Then, I would mix a couple of grams of the tumeric with your xanthan gum before adding both of our humectants (honey and glycerine). Because tumeric is neither a gelling agent nor a stabilizer like the xanthan gum, we can’t substitute. So whatever you do, don’t leave out any of the gum in exchange for the tumeric.

      Hope this helps!

      Reply
    • Hi Karina,

      For my liquid soaps, I always use Saliguard (Plantaserve) as it has a very high PH threshold. Surfactants always push the PH up, and so to compensate for that we use a preservative that can withstand this increase in PH.

      But overall, it’s a wonderful broad-spectrum preservative that you can use in all of your homemade products that require one. I use it for virtually everything now and I’m very happy so far.

      Reply
  6. Hi Angela,
    Thank you so much for sharing your Knowledge to the world. I’ve searched quite some time for making shower gel and all ended up using Lye method.

    Btw, I wonder what kind of perfume is being used in Purovel shower gel (made in Swiss). Is it Bergamot? I found many European soap producers have almost the same typical scent.

    One last question, how to incorporate the herbs/fruit puree in this recipe?

    Reply
    • Hi Elny,

      We have never used the brand of shower gel that you have mentioned so unfortunately cannot tell you what scent it is.
      As for the herbs and fruit puree idea, this sounds wonderful but we have not tried it ourselves yet. We will give it a go soon… but please let us know if you give it a try yourself, we would love to know how it turns out!

      Reply
  7. Hello Angela,

    Do you have a percentage for all the ingredients in case someone wanted to narrow down the size of a batch? Thanks for your help.5 stars

    Reply
    • Hi Alexandra,

      You can adjust the yield using the plus and minus buttons. You can also use the buttons above the ingredients list to change it to 1/2, 1x, 2x or 3x the batch size.

      Reply
  8. hello. thank you for the formula. I love it. I am wondering whether i can use this formula for pet shampoo. It would be great if i can know some suggestion about pet shampoo using natural surfactant.

    Reply
    • Hi Snow,

      This is a good question. But unfortunately I have no experience with making bath and body products for pets. As I’m no expert on animal skincare, I can’t really say for sure. Apologies.

      Reply
  9. Can I use castille soap along with cocoa glycoside in this and the bubble bath recipe ?? Will it make it more bubbly?

    Reply
    • Hi Nikki,

      I find Castille soap isn’t really the bubbliest soap. If you really want to a bubbly liquid shower gel, you could consider a less natural surfactant. These are designed to be super bubbly. But the best option is likely to be SLSA, which is a natural surfactant but does make a very bubbly shower gel. I use it in bubble bath and foaming bath bombs.

      Reply
    • Hi Tina.

      While you could give it a go, I’ve found Cocamidopropyl betaine a great co-surfactant, as part of a surfactant system. On its own, it’s not all that good. If possible, try to combine it with others where you can. But if it’s all you can get your hands on right now, I would definitely try it.

      Reply
  10. Hi Angela,

    Thanks for sharing this. I’ve purchased the ingredients and will be trying this in the next 2 weeks, I can hardly wait!

    I would like to customize it to include seamoss. This would be my question; Should I use powder or gel format when adding?

    Best regards,
    Janique5 stars

    Reply
    • Hi Janique,

      That’s great! Let me know how you get on!

      For the seamoss, I would work with gel. While I haven’t worked with this ingredient in the past, I’ve always found liquid versions of certain ingredients can be much easier to work with.

      Reply
      • Dear Angela,

        Thanks so much for replying!
        In that case, what element of the recipe would you recommend replacing? My thought was to use the Irish Moss powdered instead of the xanthan gum. In case of the gel, can i add it as a supplement to your recipe?

        Best regards,
        Janique

        Reply
  11. Thank you for this formula, excited to try it out with my mum. Would adding sorbitol or sodium stearic acid be ok? Or suitable alternative? I understand that sorbitol acts a humectant too. Also sodium stearic acid for being an emollient and emulsifier.

    Reply
  12. Hello. Thank you for this formula. I was wondering – I would like to add a carrier oil to the formula. For doing this, should I decrease the amount of water and add the oil? If yes, what percentage could be added – almond oil, for example?

    Reply
    • Hi Plamena,

      Unfortunately, this isn’t likely to work. While the surfactants sort of work as a solubilizer, it won’t be able to mix the water and oil in a ratio that will give you any benefit. You’ll have separation issues. If you are looking for a creamier body wash, take a look at this recipe. While it doesn’t have a carrier oil, the finished product is intensely creamy and moisturizing.

      Reply

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