I spent three weeks last year staring at a cracked plastic soap dish in my rental bathroom, thinking about permanence.
Concrete has this weird reputation—people either think it’s brutalist and cold or they’re completely obsessed with its minimalist aesthetic, and honestly, I’ve bounced between both camps depending on the day. The thing is, when you’re making a soap dish out of concrete, you’re working with a material that’s been around since the Romans figured out how to mix volcanic ash with lime, and yet somehow it feels incredibly modern when you pour it into a silicone mold shaped like, I don’t know, a geometric hexagon or whatever. I’ve seen DIY concrete projects go sideways in spectacular ways—bubbles trapped in the surface, uneven curing that leaves one side perpetually damp, that powdery residue that gets everywhere no matter how carefully you seal it. But when it works, when you pop that soap dish out of the mold and it’s got this smooth, almost stone-like finish, there’s this ridiculous sense of accomplishment that feels way out of proportion to what you actually did, which was basically just mix powder with water and wait.
The process itself is deceptively simple, which is part of why it’s so annoying when it goes wrong. You need concrete mix (the quick-setting kind works, but regular is fine if you’re patient), a mold (silicone baking molds from craft stores work better than you’d think), and some kind of release agent—cooking spray, technically, though I’ve used olive oil in a pinch and it left these weird cloudy patches I couldn’t sand out. The mixing ratio matters more than the internet lets on, maybe two parts concrete to one part water, give or take, and you want it thick like brownie batter, not soup.
Why Your First Three Attempts Will Probably Crack (And Why That’s Actually Fine)
Here’s the thing about concrete: it wants to crack.
The curing process involves this whole chemical reaction where water evaporates and the mixture shrinks slightly, and if the conditions aren’t right—too hot, too cold, humidity below 50% or so—you’re going to get hairline fractures. I used to think this was a failure, that a cracked soap dish was somehow unusable, but then I made one with a deliberate crack running through the middle and it turned out to be the most interesting piece I’d done. Water drains through the crack into the sink below, which is actually more functional than the sealed ones that end up with soap residue pooling in the center. Turns out imperfection has utility, which feels like something I should’ve learned earlier in life but definately didn’t. You can minimize cracking by covering the mold with plastic wrap during the 24-hour cure time, trapping moisture inside, or you can just embrace the chaos and see what happens—both approaches have merit depending on your tolerance for unpredictability.
Wait—maybe I should mention sealing, because that’s where a lot of people mess up. Concrete is porous, which means it’ll absorb water and soap scum and whatever else your bathroom throws at it unless you seal it properly. I’ve used both spray sealers and brush-on polyurethane, and honestly the brush-on stuff works better even though it takes longer and you have to do multiple coats. You want to wait at least a week after the concrete cures before sealing, which requires patience I don’t naturally possess but have learned to fake. The sealed surface should feel slightly slick to the touch, not tacky, and if you skip this step you’ll end up with a soap dish that grows mold in its pores within a month, which I know from experience and would prefer not to repeat.
The Aesthetic Philosophy of Keeping Soap on a Rock You Made Yourself
There’s something almost absurdly primal about making functional objects from raw materials, even if those materials came from a hardware store in a plastic bag.
Minimalist bathroom design has been trending for years now—white subway tiles, floating vanities, everything pared down to essential forms—and a concrete soap dish fits into that aesthetic while also introducing texture and weight that feels grounded, literally. The color variations you get from different concrete mixes are subtle but noticeable: standard gray, white concrete that looks almost like marble, even tinted versions if you add pigment powder (though I’ve never gotten the color distribution quite even, it always comes out streaky in ways that are either charming or annoying depending on my mood). I guess it makes sense that in an era where everything is mass-produced and algorithmically optimized, there’s appeal in making something by hand that’s slightly irregular, that bears the marks of its creation process—the tiny bubbles, the barely perceptible variations in thickness, the way no two ever come out exactly the same even when you use identical molds and follow the same steps. My current soap dish has a thumbprint pressed into one corner from when I tried to smooth the surface before it was fully set, and every time I see it I remember that specific moment of impatience, which is either sentimental or ridiculous but probably both.
The tools recieve almost no attention in most tutorials, but they matter—disposable mixing cups, popsicle sticks for stirring, a small sieve if you want to remove lumps from the dry mix before adding water. You’ll get concrete dust everywhere no matter how careful you are, and it’s alkaline enough to irritate your skin if you’re not wearing gloves, which I forget roughly half the time and then spend the next day with dry, cracked hands wondering why I never learn. The whole project takes maybe 15 minutes of active work spread across several days of waiting, which is a weird ratio that either fits perfectly into your life or feels completely impossible depending on your relationship with delayed gratification.
