Best Soap Making Books
Our picks for beginners, experienced soap makers, and everyone in between.
A Note About Soap Making Books
There are a lot of soap making books. A lot of them are not worth your money. The self-publishing boom has flooded Amazon with thin, recycled guides that read like someone summarized a few forum threads and called it a book. We're not going to list those here.
The books below are the ones that the soap making community actually uses and recommends — books that have been around long enough to prove their value, plus a few newer titles that have earned their spot. We've organized them by where you are in the hobby. Start at the top if you're new. Jump to the bottom if you want chemistry.
For Beginners
If you've never made soap, start here. These books walk you through the entire process from scratch and assume you don't know the difference between NaOH and KOH yet.
Smart Soapmaking
This is the book most online soap makers will tell you to read first. Watson is a former professional soap maker who strips the process down to what actually matters. No filler, no fluff. She explains why outmoded methods (like monitoring temperature obsessively) complicate things unnecessarily, and she teaches a simpler, faster approach that produces consistent results.
Concise, practical, and confidence-building. If you're nervous about working with lye, this book will calm you down. Available with both customary and metric measurements.
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Making Natural Soaps
Don't let the title put you off — this is a thorough, well-organized beginner's guide that covers cold process, melt and pour, liquid soap, and even pet soap. Notable for soap makers using SoapCalc: it includes a dedicated chapter on getting the most out of the SoapCalc calculator. That alone makes it worth having alongside the tool.
Pure Soapmaking
Faiola is the founder of Bramble Berry and the person behind Soap Queen TV on YouTube. This is her best book. 32 cold-process recipes with step-by-step photography, plus solid chapters on choosing oils, using natural additives, and designing your own recipes. The photography is gorgeous — it makes soap making look like something you'd want to do, which matters when you're starting out.
If you respond better to visual instruction than text-heavy guides, this is your book.
The Natural Soap Making Book for Beginners
Currently the bestselling soap making book on Amazon, and for good reason. Straightforward cold-process instruction using all-natural herbs, spices, and essential oils. The recipes are simple enough for a first batch but interesting enough that you'll keep coming back. Doesn't try to cover every method — it focuses on cold process and does it well.
Natural & Botanical Soap
For soap makers interested in herbs, natural colorants, essential oils, and plant-based recipes.
Simple & Natural Soapmaking
50 recipes using natural ingredients — herbs, botanicals, herbal-infused oils, natural colorants. The natural colorants gallery alone is worth the price: 50+ soaps photographed with different plant-based colors, so you know what turmeric, indigo, madder root, and spirulina actually look like in finished soap before you commit your batch.
All recipes are palm-free, which is increasingly important to soap makers who want to avoid palm oil. Covers both cold process and slow-cooker hot process. Excellent step-by-step photography.
The Natural Soap Book
One of the original soap making books and still relevant. Cavitch covers vegetable-based cold process soap from raw materials through the finished product. Orange County Register and Country Living both praised this one when it came out, and it's been a staple on soap makers' shelves ever since. Pairs well with her more comprehensive Soapmaker's Companion (below).
Intermediate & Recipe Collections
You've made a few batches. You know what trace looks like. Now you want to get better.
Soap Crafting
Faiola's first book, and more technique-focused than Pure Soapmaking. Shows you how to use household items as molds, how to create swirls and embeds, and how beer, coffee, avocado, and wine behave in cold process soap. 30 recipes. Library Journal called it a comprehensive guide where "beginners will easily take to this craft." If you liked Pure Soapmaking and want more, this is the next step.
The Soapmaker's Companion
Comprehensive is the right word. Techniques, recipes, troubleshooting, and business advice all in one volume. More detailed than The Natural Soap Book and aimed at soap makers ready to go deeper. Has been a standard reference since the late '90s.
Important: The author and publisher have noted that the recipe variation in the sidebar on page 36 (adding honey to lye water) can cause a dangerous reaction. Skip that specific variation.
Essentially Soap
A classic. "Dr. Bob" spent years refining recipes for cold process, melt and pour, and rebatched soap with a focus on essential oils, aromatherapy, and scent design. The book covers how fragrances interact with the saponification process — useful knowledge when you're working out why your lavender disappeared during cure or your clove oil seized your batch.
Originally $19.95, now often found used. If you see one at a reasonable price, grab it.
Milk Soap
Milk Soapmaking
The first practical, comprehensive book on making soap with milk — goat milk, cow milk, coconut milk, buttermilk, you name it. Watson's approach is the same as in Smart Soapmaking: clear, modern methods that skip the unnecessary complexity. Milk soap requires different handling (temperature matters more, scorching is a real risk), and this book covers it properly.
If you keep goats or just love the feel of milk soap on your skin, this is the reference.
Liquid & Transparent Soap
These are not beginner books. Both assume you've made cold process soap and are comfortable with lye calculations.
Making Natural Liquid Soaps
If you want to make liquid soap from scratch with KOH (not the synthetic detergent that most "liquid soap" actually is), this is the book. Failor covers the chemistry, the cooking process, and the dilution stage. Expect to feel overwhelmed before your first batch. That's normal — liquid soap is harder than bar soap. But if you've done cold process for a while and want a new challenge, this delivers.
Making Transparent Soap
The definitive guide to transparent (clear) soap. The process is more complex than standard cold process — it involves solvents and additional cooking steps. Failor does a decent job explaining it, but be warned: some instructions are unclear for a first attempt. Treat this as an essential reference that you'll need to supplement with forum reading and trial batches. Useful troubleshooting section.
The Science
For when you want to understand why soap does what it does, not just how to make it.
Scientific Soapmaking: The Chemistry of the Cold Process
This is the one. Dunn is a chemistry professor at Hampden-Sydney College who brought actual scientific rigor to handcrafted soap making. The book explains the chemistry of fats, oils, and saponification, and then teaches you how to test your own soap using equipment and methods accessible to non-chemists.
It reads like a college textbook — because it is one. There are problems to solve at the end of sections. You won't need a chemistry degree, but you should be comfortable with the idea that SAP values are more than just numbers you plug into a calculator. If you've ever wondered why your superfat percentage matters at the molecular level, or what exactly happens during gel phase, this is the book that answers it.
Not for beginners. Not for people who just want recipes. For people who want to understand the craft at a fundamental level. One Goodreads reviewer put it well: "Scientific Soapmaking is to soapmaking as Sun Tzu's Art of War is to war."
Still Looking?
New soap making books come out constantly, and the quality varies wildly. Before you buy anything not on this list, check the reviews on Soapmaking Forum's book review section — actual soap makers reviewing actual books. Worth more than Amazon ratings, which tend to include people who bought the book and never made soap.
And when you're ready to turn those recipes into actual soap: the SoapCalc calculator is here.