His name is Robert Paulson.

Who doesn’t love Tyler Durden and Fight Club? In the spirit of the Paper Street Soap Company, Kevin and I decided we would try to make our own soap.

Unfortunately, we didn’t render human fat, and as Kevin is vegetarian, we had to use vegetable oil. After doing a little research, we picked some oils, ordered four pounds of lye (NaOH), and got to work. It’s apparently a very long process, starting with combining your fats and heating them until the mixture homogenizes, mixing lye into water (never putting water into lye), mixing until “trace,” and letting it sit… for 4-6 weeks.

Our recipe called for 175 grams of lye into about 514 ml of water (~8.5 M). The highest concentration of NaOH I’d worked with (in Quant lab) had been only .4 molar, but that wasn’t so dangerous, so why should 20 times more concentrated do any harm?

Our handywork is sitting in my basement, and over the course of the last few days it has hardened from about liquid soap to a substantially thick paste. Hopefully when it finishes, we will have usable soap.