DIY “Thieves” Foaming Hand Soap

Foaming Thieves hand soap smells wonderful, cleans your hands well, and helps kill germs (okay, any soap will do that but Thieves SMELLS so good!). It is also kind of spendy! Even the refills make me cringe so I thought making a DIY version was worth a shot. I reused the Thieves foaming soap bottles and it worked well.

My older son loves the smell of Thieves soap too, and since he has moved into his apartment in another state is in need of some good hand soap.

I was able to order some nice foaming soap bottles from Amazon, and had YL Thieves oil and liquid hand soap. The soap I used is the big jug of moisturizing hand soap with aloe from Sam’s, but you just need about an ounce per bottle. I do not recommend the antibacterial soaps with triclosan added.

A bit about Thieves blend…I like Young Living’s Thieves best of all the ones I have tried. I do NOT think Young Living has the ONLY pure, safe, effective essential oils and I freely use oils from other companies, but this particular blend just smells better to me than any other I have tried. When purchasing oils, do your research and be sure you trust the company as to the purity of the oils.

If you wanted any other essential oil scent you can substitute pretty much any oil you like. Lavender is always nice, and I love grapefruit scented soap too.

Here’s what you need to make “Bootleg” Thieves Hand Soap:

Foaming soap bottle

Liquid hand soap, ideally moisturizing

Thieves oil (or whatever floats your boat)

Distilled water

Glass measuring cup

Measuring spoon (tablespoon)

Whisk or fork

Measure about 2 Tablespoons of the liquid soap into the cup.

Add 15 drops of Thieves essential oil to the soap and mix with the fork or whisk.

Add about 4 ounces of distilled water and mix well.

Pour your mix into the soap bottle.

Add another 4 ounces or so of water and swirl to mix.

Add a couple more ounces of water to total about 10 ounces. You need to leave plenty of headroom to allow for the foam pump. I was making these to send to New Mexico so left a bit more headroom to allow for altitude changes. This was less successful than I had hoped, but at least the box smelled good when my son opened it.

Close tightly and swirl gently to mix; way back in Chemistry lab we were taught to “invert and swirl”.

If you have a label maker you can put one on. Chalkboard style labels would be really cute but I didn’t have any of those.

Here are the three bottles all ready to ship west…I bagged them in a sealed Ziploc but apparently they still leaked.

Well, that’s my little tutorial. I hope you find it helpful!