Tutorial: DIY foaming hand soap

Every year my hands get super dry in the harsh, dry Colorado winters. A few years ago, I switched to foaming soap and it seemed to help. However, foaming soap is more expensive and considering that winter is also cold and flu season, we wash our hands quite a bit more. So, to cut down on the cost, I decided to try making my own foaming soap.

~Did you know that it's mostly water?~

You are actually paying for watered down soap! I also tend to shop clearance and so after Halloween last year, I was looking through the Halloween clearance and happened upon Softsoap bottles that had Halloween illustrations for only 24 cents each! I grabbed a whole case of them because I figured who cares what the picture is, right?

So here's my tutorial for making your own foaming soap for (in this case) only 48 cents!

Here's what you'll need:
An empty container
2 bottles of regular hand soap
Tap water

I used a empty bottle from the foaming soap I'd used before I ran out :-) You can use any container that will hold the finished product. Here you can see the empty container holds 40oz. of liquid. I found that my container was large enough to contain the foaming soap mixture. The soaps were 5.5oz each so 11oz together.

The first thing you do is add water to your larger container. You want a mix of 2 parts water 1 part hand soap. In this case, with the 2x 5.5oz bottles, I had 11oz of soap so I needed 33oz of water. This isn't exact science. Just get close with the measurements.
~Add the water first because it's soap and adding the water to the soap will cause it to bubble up too quickly and you can end up with a mess.~

Then upend the soap bottles into the larger container. This is what takes the most time. But I just set the soap bottle up and walked away to do something else for a bit. Here is what it looks like when you're done. 

You can see there's a little bit of soap in the soap bottles. So I added a little water to the soap containers and shook them a little to mix it up. Then I added those into the large container. 

     

And that's all! Super simple! You can do this with any kind of soap. I just used the Softsoap because I got such an amazing deal on it. This will take a couple of hours for the bubbles to settle down. I save all our foaming handsoap bottles and just refill them. Why should you pay so much more for the foaming soap when you now know it's 2/3 water?