Homemade Rose Hip Soap Recipe (2024)

Do you have delicate skin or skin that is beginning to show the marks of passing time? Rose hip soap may be the perfect bar of all-natural herbal soap to care for your skin! As a facial bar, it will leave you with a brighter, healthier complexion while combating the signs of aging!

Rose Hip Skin Benefits

Rose hips have 50% more vitamin C than oranges! Crazy right? You’d think we’d hear about them more. It’s certainly why I love finding more rose hip recipes and ways to use them.

But what does that mean for you skin? Well, the antioxidants from Vitamin C are shown to encourage the synthesis of collagen, reduce and prevent fine lines, scars, and wrinkles. The high vitamin A content in rose hips may work to regenerate new skin cells.

Rose hips have anti-inflammatory and free-radical scavenging properties. Phytochemicals in rose hips work to fight cell damage.

This makes rose hips an excellent choice for your skin care!

Where to get Rose Hips

Roses are abundant, both in the wild and as a cultivated plant. Rose hips from all varieties of rose can be used. The hips form in the fall and will persist into winter.

While you’re out foraging for rose hips for food and medicine, be sure to grab an extra handful or two to incorporate into your DIY natural beauty routine!

Learn more about what to forage in fall and winter here.

{This post is sponsored by Mountain Rose Herbs}

You can also purchase dried rose hips from Mountain Rose Herbs, my favorite place for high quality, organic dried herbs.

Rose Hip Soap Recipe

Rose Hip Soap Ingredients

• 2 Tablespoons dried rose hips
• 2 cups water
• 15 ounces purified tallow
• 8 ounces coconut oil
• 5 ounces sweet almond oil
• 2 ounces rose hip seed oil
• 2 ounces castor oil
• 12.16 ounces rose hip herbal infusion tea
• 4.58 ounces sodium hydroxide (lye)
• 1 Tablespoon French rose clay
• .15ml rose essential oil
• 10 drops geranium essential oil

This rose hip soap recipe is a cold-processed soap using only all-natural ingredients including rose hip herbal infusion and rose hip seed oil.

I prefer soaps using base fats that I know to be sustainable, such as tallow and lard. Both are excellent choices to nourish your skin and you can feel good knowing that you’re finding a purpose for a product that was destined for a landfill.

If you can’t source tallow, or are uncomfortable using it, see the recipe notes below for an alternative combination of oils.

I chose tallow as the base oil for this recipe. I love using tallow because it creates a moisturizing bar that won’t turn to mush like many homemade soaps have a tendency to do.

Coconut oil gives the bar cleansing properties without being too harsh while the sweet almond oil and rose hip seed oil increase the moisturizing and skin softening effects of this soap.

You can substitute rose hip seed oil for all of the sweet almond oil if the cost isn’t too prohibitive, for a total of 7 ounces rose hip seed oil. Or you can make an herbal oil infusion with rose hips in the sweet almond oil. A little castor oil increases the lather because isn’t that half the fun and what really makes feel clean?

French rose clay is used to clean and detoxify the skin, sloughing off dead skin cells. You can also substitute Rose Kaolin Clay or Australian Red Clay and get a similar beautiful mauve color to your soap.

You could also add powdered rose hips. They will create a natural look with dark brown speckles in the soap. Since dried rose hips are so crunchy and hard, I’d be concerned about the exfoliation causing micro-dermabrasions.

Finding a natural fragrance for rose hip soap was tricky because rose essential oil is expensive. I was able to find rose essential oil absolute and use a little geranium essential oil, both very old-fashioned scents, to anchor the rose.

Of course, you can always use your favorite essential oil blend or use no scent at all if you’re just interested in all of the herbal goodness from the rose hips.

How to Make Rose Hip Soap

I won’t be going into all the basics of how to make soap for beginners. The process is pretty much the same for most simple cold processed soaps.

I very highly recommend Jan Berry’s Natural Soap Making eBook and Soap Making Success course if you are new to making soap!

This recipe will make about 10 bars depending on the size of your mold.

Make the Rose Hip Tea

Begin making rose hip soap by brewing up a rose hip herbal infusion tea. I just pour 2 cups of boiling water over the dried rose hips, cover it , and allow it to cool down to room temperature. Then strain out the rose hips with a fine mesh sieve lined with a coffee filter to remove all of the irritating hairs.

Tip: Freeze the Liquids

I actually prefer to freeze all of my liquids when making soap. I pour the tea into ice cube trays and pop them in the freezer. I do this for four reasons: safety, time, no fumes, and it’s more likely that the beneficial properties from the herbs and oils will stay intact when your ingredients aren’t repeatedly heated to high temperatures.

When you make homemade soap, you’re going to spend some time waiting for things to cool down. Normally, after you mix the lye into the liquid it gets really hot and you have a container of lye water just sitting around while it cools.

You can’t plan on exactly how long it will take to cool either so it takes a chunk out of the day. I’d rather freeze the liquid so I can go about my business in the meanwhile.

If you use a frozen liquid in the lye mix, the lye water is usually at the perfect temperature to stir into the melted fats when the ice cubes have dissolved. I’ve also noticed that when you use ice cubes there isn’t the issue of fumes with the lye which is awesome.

Measure and Weigh the Ingredients

Once your tea is ready, you will need to measure out solid fats, tallow, and coconut oil. Create a makeshift double boiler with a small saucepan full of water. Set the bowl with the solid fats in it over the saucepan and melt them down.

Meanwhile, weigh the rose hip tea into the container you’ll be mixing the soap in.

Wearing eye protection, weigh the sodium hydroxide (lye) into a separate container.

Slowly sprinkle the lye into the tea with a slow constant stirring using a silicone spatula. Continue stirring until the lye has fully dissolved and set it aside.

Next you’ll need another bowl to weigh out the liquid oils, sweet almond oil, castor oil, and rose hip oil. I measure them all into the same bowl, but many recommend weighing each oil into their own container before combining them so you don’t accidentally pour in too much. (It’s good advice.)

Finally, you’ll need to get your add-in’s ready. Measure out the essential oils into a container and get that tablespoon of powdered clay ready to go.

Make the Soap

Once the oils in the double boiler are melted, remove them from the heat. Stir in the combination of liquid oils and check the base temperature. Check the temperature of the lye mixture and figure out the average of both numbers so you have an idea of what temperature you’ll be soaping. You’re shooting for about 95-105 degrees.

When everything has cooled to a good temperature, add the oil mixture to the lye mixture and, using an immersion blender, begin pulsing and stirring to thoroughly incorporate all of the ingredients together.

When the temperature begins to rise, you know you’re heading to a true trace. I usually stop after it has risen 2 degrees from my starting temperature and has thickened to a thin, pudding-like consistency. (Sometimes it’s still thin even after the temperature goes up. I just keep blending until I get it to a consistency I like in that case.)

Once you’ve reached trace, add in the french rose clay and essential oils and blend it for another minute or so until they are fully incorporated.

Pour the soap into the mold and decorate as your creativity inspires you. Crushed or whole rose hips, rose buds, or rose petals are all beautiful!

Cover with waxed paper and set aside to harden for about 48 hours.

Remove the soap from the mold and cut it into bars if you used a loaf mold. (If the soap seems soft or tacky, it may need to sit another day or so before removing from the mold.)

Allow the soap to cure in a dark place for at least 4 weeks, but preferably for 8 weeks. This will ensure your bars are fully-cured and will be hard enough to last a while.

More rose hip recipes to try:

• Rose Hip Tea with Fresh or Dried Rose Hips
• Homemade Vitamin C Gummies with Rosehips
• Rose Hip Facial Oil: Homemade Face Serum
• Rose Hip Syrup: Foraged and Made with Honey
• Reishi Mushroom Infused Red Wine with Rose Hips
• Rose Hip Lip Balm for Soothing Dry Lips
• Rose Hip Whiskey Smash: Foraged Fall co*cktail

More Natural Soap Recipes

Here are some more soap recipes for you to make now that you know the basics:

• Wild Rose and Yarrow Soap
• Kombucha Soap
• Dandelion Soap
• Calendula Soap
• Rosemary Mint Shampoo Bars

Quinn Veon handcrafts all-natural herbal & botanical soap and skin care products inspired by the farm and garden. You can follow her on Instagram @quillhavenfarm.