Dirt Soap

I get through a lot of coffee in a day, which produces a lot of waste grounds. I've found various ways to reuse a proportion of them, and this is one of my favourites. I use a melt and pour soap base (one day I'll get round to learning to make soap from scratch!), coffee grounds and a few other ingredients to make a scrubby soap. Looks like dirt, but gets you clean!

Essential:

1. used coffee grounds
2. melt and pour soap base - I use the Stephenson brand, which is widely available in the UK
3. double boiler
4. soap moulds

Optional:

1. essential oils - I used lime and tea tree
2. shea butter
3. cocoa butter
4. activated charcoal
5. nettle powder
6. argan oil
7. or anything else you have lying about the house!

This is the most delicious step - I saved my espresso grounds, which are very fine. You can use any type of ground coffee you have, but the coarser the grind, the more abrasive it will be, so you might find say filter coffee grounds are best used on your feet rather than all over. I don't have sensitive skin, so I can use this soap on most of my body.

I saved the grounds from about five espressos, and each time I made a coffee I turned the used grounds over, so they'd all dry out. You want your grounds to be completely dry before you use them.

Once your grounds are completely dried out, you're ready to make your soap. I was making two sets of soap, one with grounds and one without, so these pictures are of double the quantity used for my three bars of dirt soap.

I chopped about 600g (it works out a bit under 100g per bar, but measuring isn't essential) of soap base up, and added it to my double boiler. As it was heating, I also added a chunk each of shea and cocoa butter. These are both nice and moisturising, so they make a nice addition.

I turned the heat off, and added my argan and essential oils (ideally you always want to add these once the heat is off, to preserve any properties they might have). I added about ten drops of each - exact numbers aren't too important, as long as you're under about 1% of the total weight, so I just add until it smells good! I stirred these in well.

Next I added the nettle powder - this clumped up a lot and I needed to stir it a ton. I'd have preferred to stir it into the coffee grounds and add it all together, but as I was doing two batches of soap in one and I wanted the nettle powder in both, I did it this way (another time I think I'd mix the nettle powder in with a little bit of the melted soap, then add that in to the main batch).

I mixed the charcoal powder in with the coffee grounds, then added that to the soap mix. Stir stir stir!

Easy and obvious - I poured the soap mix into my moulds.

Melt and pour soap base sets solid really quickly, so you'll very likely find you have a bit left over that's started to set in your pan. In an ideal world you wouldn't reheat soap that's had oils added already, but I prefer to waste as little as possible, so I peeled any scrappy bits of soap off from around the pan, and melted them together. I used a smaller mould to pour the remnants into, and also pressed in the very last bits I peeled from the pan after the final pour.

As you can see this results in a very ugly bar of soap, but for me this is perfect to keep by the kitchen sink, for when I have dye to scrub off my hands!

I left my soaps a day to make sure they were fully set (because we're using melt and pour base rather than working from scratch, I don't find there's a need to let it cure for weeks - when it's set it's done), and popped them out the mould. The coffee and charcoal coloured the whole soap brown, but the grounds rose up a bit, meaning I had a smooth massage side and a rougher scrubbier side. If you want scrubby all the way through, use more grounds.

Done!