Two methods. One course.
Solid cleansing bars made clear
Formulate Cleansing Bars That Clean Without Stripping the Skin
A focused course covering two methods, full ingredient walkthroughs, and a lesson on checking pH for mildness. You'll understand what makes a bar mild rather than harsh, which means you can troubleshoot a soft or crumbly batch instead of starting over.
The Real Problem
WHY THIS COURSE EXISTS
Cleansing bars look easy. That's exactly why so many of them fail.
Search for cleansing bar recipes, and you'll find plenty. What you won't find is agreement.
One says your bar needs a particular surfactant, the next says never touch it. One gives you a hardness number; another contradicts it. One skips pH altogether. Every source sounds sure of itself, and very few explain why they made the choices they did.
Then you make a batch. It comes out too soft, crumbles in the mould, or lathers beautifully and leaves the skin tight and stripped. You followed the instructions, so you have no idea what to change. So you find another recipe and start again.
I've been teaching formulation for years, and this is the pattern I see most. Someone follows a bar recipe, it doesn't work, and because they never learned what each ingredient does, they can't work out why. More recipes just means more contradictions to sift through.
That's why this course teaches how cleansing bars work. You'll learn how surfactants clean, why some are milder than others, and what each ingredient contributes to the bar.
You'll learn two methods for building a surfactant bar, when each is best suited to your setup, and how to check pH so your bars stay gentle on skin. When a batch misbehaves, you'll know where to look.
"A good cleansing bar cleans without stripping the skin, keeps its shape between uses, and starts with a surfactant blend chosen for the face or body it's made for".
Time for change
A few things that might sound familiar:
You've made cleansing bars before, but they came out too soft, crumbled in the mould, left skin feeling tight and stripped, and you couldn't work out what to change.
You've collected recipes from different sources and they all contradict each other. You're not sure which advice to trust or which approach is sound.
You can follow a formula, but if someone asked you why you chose that surfactant or that percentage, you'd struggle to give a clear answer.
I know the frustration you feel is real. I know you're putting in real effort, but you don't have a framework for understanding
what's happening inside your bar.
And I'm here to change that.
INTRODUCING
Cleansing Bar Lab
This course teaches solid cleansing bar formulation from the ingredients up. You'll learn two methods, understand what each ingredient does in your formula, and build bars for the face or body that clean without stripping the skin.
HOW THE COURSE IS STRUCTURED
Built on my signature EFD™ Method
Every course I build follows the same three-stage teaching structure I've developed over the last decade.
I call it the EFD Method, and it's why my students can explain the formulas they build rather than just follow them.
The structure builds your knowledge in layers. You start with the science and the ingredients, so you know what everything does and why it's there. Then you learn the practical methods and make real bars using the frame formulas I've developed.
And by the final stage, you're adapting those formulas yourself, adjusting for face or body, working through texture and mildness, and making decisions based on what you've learned rather than what a recipe told you.
By the end, you won't be looking for another recipe, because you'll know how to build one yourself.
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
Inside the Course Modules
What you'll cover in each module
Understand the foundations of solid cleansing bars. You'll look at what's already on the market, learn how surfactants clean and why some are milder than others, and walk through the ingredients in a solid cleansing bar and what each contributes. You'll also meet Ellie, your AI tutor. By the end, you'll be able to read a surfactant blend and understand what the bar needs structurally to hold together and stay gentle.
You'll prepare to formulate and make your own cleansing bar using two methods for surfactant-based bars: a hot-pour method set in a mould and a pressed puck method, with video guidance at each stage. You'll build two frame formulas along the way, one for the face and one for the body, since the two ask for a slightly different approach. You'll also learn to check pH, so you can tell whether a bar is mild enough for skin before it ever reaches a face.
This is where you make it yours. You'll learn to design your own formulations and troubleshoot when a bar doesn't behave. Soft, crumbly, harsh, tight on the skin, you'll know what causes each and how to adjust for it. By this point, you're the one deciding what the bar needs to do and building it accordingly. Tweaking scent or skin feel is the easy part once you understand the structure underneath.
Course notes you can read online or download and keep, sample frame formulas to learn from and adapt, and the Bluebooks bonus with Azur, your interactive Bluebooks guide. Plus community access to talk things through with other formulators.
What's included
What you get
At the end of the course, you’ll leave with:
The ability to troubleshoot instead of starting over
Clear understanding of how cleansing bars are structured
A repeatable way to adapt and build your own formulas
Confidence in choosing and adjusting surfactants
The ability to formulate for face or body, beyond recipes
Video lessons across both formulation methods
Sample frame formulas to learn from and adapt
Full ingredient walkthroughs covering what each component does
A dedicated pH lesson so you can check your bars are mild
Guidance on safe limits and formulation boundaries, so you know what to adjust, what to leave alone, and where the constraints matter
Ellie AI tutor, trained on the course and more
The Bluebooks (bonus), as a PDF to keep and an interactive version you can ask questions of, guided by Azur, your Bluebooks guide
Lab Notes Society community access
Downloadable course guides and reference materials
60 days of access, self-paced, modules open daily
One payment of $157
for the full course, formulas, AI and community access, and bonuses.
HEAR FROM OUR STUDENTS
Testimonials
Highly recommended
Having learned how to make shampoo bars before, I found this course to be an excellent resource for anyone, whether you're a complete beginner or have prior knowledge. It’s well-structured, easy to follow, and breaks down the formulation process in a way that's simple to understand. The course also offers valuable insights on adjusting formulas for different hair types, making it ideal for anyone looking to create custom shampoo bars. Highly recommended!
BERNADETTE, Cohort 2024
Great experience
It was a great experience taking the shampoo bar course. The guides and formulas are very professional and easy to follow. I highly recommend this course for anyone looking to level up their shampoo bars.
JESSICA, Cohort 2025
My shampoo bars rock
You learn not one but three ways of making shampoo bars! Are you kidding me? Worth every cent. I love my hot pour balms the most, easy to upscale, easy to customise, just by sourcing different moulds. I also got Connie, the conditioner bar coach, so I now have matching conditioners, too.
TABITHA, Cohort 2025
From our formulators
MORE DETAILS
Your Questions Answered
Some basic experience helps. If you've followed formulas and made a few simple products, you'll be comfortable here. Complete beginners can take the course, but a little foundation makes it smoother.
A scale accurate to 0.01g, heat-safe containers or beakers, silicone moulds of your choice, a 3D-printed bar press, a heavy-bottomed milk pan to heat ingredients, and a hob or a double boiler. No professional lab needed. One item that isn't optional when working with solid surfactants is a proper respiratory mask, since the fine dust requires more than a simple face covering. The full list is in the Bluebook of Equipment, included with the course.
Surfactants are the ingredients that do the cleaning. You don't need a chemistry background. The course explains how they work and how to choose between them, in plain terms, as you go.
Yes. The course is about understanding how cleansing bars work, which is just as useful whether you're making bars for yourself or building towards a product to sell.
The course covers both, and the same principles apply to either. You'll learn how to adjust a formula for the skin you're making it for.
Ellie is trained on the course material and cosmetic chemistry relevant to the course, so she can guide you through the lessons and answer questions in context. She's there to support your learning as you work, not to hand you a recipe. However, you do need to realise that if you ask her non-course-related questions she is not trained on (for example, how to make a lotion), she will behave like a regular GPT and her answers won't be reliable.
The Pro Formulator Path is a comprehensive programme covering multiple product categories. This course is a focused deep-dive on one product type: cleansing bars. Different scope, different purpose.
Understand. That's the whole point. Following steps gets you one bar. Understanding what each step does lets you make the next one on your own.
It doesn't remove it, and honestly, it shouldn't. Testing is part of formulation. But there's a difference between testing when you understand what you're looking at and changing things at random because a batch failed and you're not sure why. This course is built so that when a bar doesn't come out the way you expected, you can work out what happened, which variable to look at, what to adjust, and what to leave alone. That's what turns a failed batch into useful data instead of wasted ingredients.
This is a focused spotlight course rather than a certificated one. What you leave with is the ability to formulate and troubleshoot cleansing bars on your own, which is what the course is built to give you.
60 days from enrolment. The modules open daily, so the material paces itself as you go.
You can definitely find plenty of free cleansing bar recipes online. What's harder to find are the reasons and explanations, such as why a formula is built the way it is and what to do when it doesn't work. This is what this course gives you, in one structured place, so you're not stitching together contradictory advice.
Hello!
I'm Timi.
A Cosmetic Chemist with 10 years of experience helping formulators hone their skills.
The story of this course is closely related to shampoo bars. I'd been working on solid shampoo bars, and I started wondering whether the same kind of bar would work for cleansing the skin. In a way, it does. But skin isn't hair, and it asks for a slightly different approach, gentler surfactants, a close eye on pH, and a bar that cleans without leaving the skin feeling tight.
So I went back to the drawing board and worked through it. I ended up with two frame formulas, one built for the face and one for the body, because the two aren't quite the same job.
There are some genuinely good cleansing bar formulas out there. The trouble is that most come without the explanation that would help you understand why they work, or what to do when they don't.
That's what this course is here to do.
Lets Go!
Think about the next batch you make. You could go into it the same way you have before, or you could go in knowing what each ingredient does and exactly what to adjust if something isn't right.
Free Resource
Not sure what's in a product?
Decode any cosmetic ingredient list in minutes with Lexie, the Cosmetic Label Decoder.
Lexie is a free AI assistant I trained to walk you through INCI lists the way a formulator would.
She'll tell you what each ingredient is, what it's doing in the formula, and how it fits with everything else on the list.
It's a good place to start if you're new to reading labels, and a useful reference if you're already formulating.
To chat with Lexie, you will need a ChatGPT account (a free account works).
About Formulator Hub
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