Soap Chemistry

Today I have been experimenting with some natural plant products that I’m planning to use to dye my soap. I’ve been toying with sandalwood, rosehips, henna, kelp, indigo, alkanet, chamomile, madder and pau d’arco. I spent a number of hours trying to track down something called Ratenjot that doesn’t seem to be available for sale in this country and is really expensive to have shipped here. I also have a few other plant items including ultramarine blue coming for more experimentation later - that stuff is expensive!! I feel like the mad chemist - this is so fun! I’ve also done quite a bit of research on some natural plants to use as skin care additives. I’m learning so much! This is all work toward a product line of completely natural soaps with natural essential oils (with healing qualities,) natural colorants and other skin pampering and healing additions in natural soap. By the time this product line is complete, it will be a full line of natural soaps in a whole rainbow of earthy colors - each with a specific skin healing quality. I love my job!

Experimentation

Well, today I have done some soap experimentation. I have been playing with some natural soap dyes. Plant based elements that should/could color soap without the use of synthetic dyes. So today I made a bunch of bars of soap, each with a different natural additive. Some of the things I’m trying: Alkanet, Indigo, Sandalwood, Madder Root, Henna, Kelp and Rose Hips. All of these are plant based. I wanted to try Carmine but that's insect based and I just found that toooo sad that the lil bugs had to die to dye. Beautiful color, beautiful name though. I’ll watch these samples over time and see how they morph. Should be interesting.

I also started some fragrance blending today for new series of soap fragrances. And that process takes a while as things blend and mellow together and adjustments are made. I made four blends which means my nose is shot for the day. I think it was pretty much shot before I started but that’s nothing new. Even with the allergy medication I take, there is only a fraction of the time when I can actually smell anything because of my allergies combined with my deviated septum. So blending fragrances is really a trick since it could be quite a while before I can tell exactly what I’ve just done. Who knows, it could be very cool. Or it could be the worst horror ever found in a little amber jar. I don’t know. It takes a while for the fragrances to modulate, so I’m looking forward to my little sensory surprises when I go back to them later on.

I have figured out why I put rosemary and mint together. It’s a divine combination and I finally realized the other day that when I lived in our cute little home in Indiana, I always picked garden mint tea and then I’d take a little sprig off the rosemary and steep that in with the tea. It was delicious in cold iced tea. I guess that is further proof that scent can be an entirely unconscious experiment triggering all kinds of memories and experiences. It just smells sooo good! It is one of my favorites.