Loving Lavender

As I mentioned in my earlier post this week, I'm using lavender essential oil in a new application.  The lavender oil that I use in my soaps (Lavender Lover, Cowpoke, Gardener's Gold, Summer Slacker) is a very high quality, nice smelling oil that I've been happy with over the years.  But on a trip home to Idaho last summer, I attended a family reunion and got to spend some time at the ranch of a cousin (the wife of my Dad's first cousin, actually).  She raises lavender on their place and uses it for a variety of purposes: she sells live plants, dried bundles, and makes wreaths and sachets.  

A couple of years ago she also bought a still and started producing her own lavender essential oil.  When I found out about this, I got very excited.  It's not every day that you find out someone in your own family knows how to operate a still!  I think I might have jumped up and down a little.   

She gave me a small bottle of the oil that day and I carried it around in my purse for months, sniffing it every so often.  It's really extraordinary oil.  I thought I knew what nice lavender oil smelled like, but this is better.  Apparently a large part of the difference comes from the fact that she hand picks all of the blossoms off the stems before distillation, which keeps the oil as pure and sweet smelling as can be...no extra  bitter herb smell to muddle the scent.  THIS is the oil that touches your lips when you use the new Lavender & Lemon Smooch Sticks.  They are divine, I must say. 

Gender Neutral

My kids and I love root beer. We love the smell, the taste, and the refreshing sweetness of it. True root beer is made from sarsaparilla root, but in some parts of the country there is a carbonated beverage that is very similar to root beer called birch beer. It’s made from sap extracted from the bark of the Black Birch tree (Betula lenta). Apparently, in the dairy country of Pennsylvania a float made with vanilla ice cream and birch beer is called a “Red Bull” and one made with chocolate ice cream is called a “Black Cow”. Yum.

When sweet birch essential oil is combined with vanilla oil, it blends their sweetness and herbal spice into a smell very much like birch or root beer. I use these two oils, along with pure cocoa powder in my Gender Neutral Soap. Since kids often love root beer, I wanted to stick with a child-like theme for my root beer soap. One day I happened across this hilarious vintage image of two toddlers and knew I had to use it somehow. Don’t you wonder what it was intended for originally? I would love to know!

Scents and Sensibility

A potential customer emailed me this morning asking about the scent of my soaps and needing more description before she could choose. That's the downside of selling online...the sniff test is important. The only issue with smell is that it's so subjective. I don't know how many times I've had two people (husband/wife, mother/daughter, BFFs) walk up to my booth at a fair where one picks up a soap, smells it and swoons in delight, then hands it to the other person to sniff and gets a rodent-like expression in return. People's opinions about smell differ widely. For this reason, I have hesitated to include too much of a scent description with each of my soaps. I don't want people to get them in the mail and say "Hey! That's not what it's supposed to smell like!" However, I completely understand this customer's need to know..so, here's MY opinion of what each of my soaps smells like:

Backwoods~strong pine overtones with a lighter, fresh citrus underneath.

Bitchin" Kitchen~spicy cinnamon leaf. This is different than cinnamon stick, which most people are familiar with. Often customers think that it smells more like nutmeg than cinnamon.

Buck Naked~completely, truly unscented.

Cowpoke~fresh herbal with a little woodsy thrown in. The eucalyptus lemon and the lemon essential oils are the most dominant scent, but there's a noticeable undertone of cedarwood as well.

Fish Tale~anise, spicy black licorice. I've also added tea tree to this soap because it tones down and rounds out the smell of the anise, but it's got a very dominant black licorice smell.

Gardeners Gold~fresh citrus with floral undertones. You quickly notice the grapefruit smell in this soap, but the overall smell is really more fresh floral. Lavender and geranium are not very sweet flowers (like rose or jasmine), so I would put it in a more herbal/fresh category of floral.

Gender Neutral~sweet with spicy undertones. This soap smells like root beer. The dominant scent is vanilla, but the sweet birch essential oil (which is like wintergreen) adds a distinctive spice.

Hard Working Hand~ fresh and slightly herbal spiciness. This one's a little hard to categorize. It's not a heavy scent at all...mostly fresh and light herbal.

Haute Goat~unscented, but the goat's milk has a natural sweetness to it that comes through in the soap. Someone with a good sense of smell would notice it, but others might not. If you put it right next to the Buck Naked, you could definitely smell the sweetness.

Highland Fling~sweet like brown sugar, but not in a cloying way. The honey gets a bit caramelized during the soapmaking process, and combines with the natural sweetness of the beeswax. Love it.

Lap of Luxury~minty with citrus undertones. The dominant smell is spearmint, which is a more sweet herbal scent than peppermint. Tangerine lightens the mint smell and gives it more depth.

Lavender Lover~straight-up, high quality lavender essential oil. Good stuff.

Manly Man~musky and smokey with fresh citrus undertones. This is probably the hardest one to describe. Clary sage has a very herbal smell and vetiver is quite smokey on its own. I add lime to lighten and give complexity to both of those oils. Many people who smell this soap say that it reminds them of their grandfather or some older gentleman. Clary sage and vetiver were both commonly used in men's products a couple generations ago.

Naughty Nellie~floral, with herbal undertones. This has a sweet, slightly herbal floral smell, with some extra hoppiness from the ale that the soap is made with.

Rejuvenation~heavy, sweet floral. I would call this one almost Victorian in its smell. Very girlie.

Road Trip~patchouli, but lighter...not the heavy hippie smell often associated with that essential oil. I add orange to soften the sometimes overwhelming scent of patchouli. Often customers will smell this soap and say "I usually don't like patchouli, but this is really nice!"

Sasquatch~ woodsy and herbal. Cedarwood and tea tree are both very distinctive smells...one person described them as smelling like shoe polish. The lemon essential oil lightens and freshens the scent. This soap always makes me think of mossy bark, and being in the forest.

Smooth Shave~ fresh with herbal undertones. Coriander and cilantro are the same plant. Think of cilantro salad with a citrus dressing.

Summer Slacker~ sage and lavender with a fresh kick of light citrus. This soap has a dominant herbal smell. If you like sage, you'll love this. It reminds me of summer...hence the name.


Hope that helps!!

Soap Scents

I'm going to be trying out some new scent combinations today in a batch of soap and I've been thinking about how I've learned some things over the past 17+ years regarding soap scents.

When I started in the early 1990s, I used fragrance (synthetic) oils for scent because they were so much cheaper than true essential oils and had a very strong and lasting aroma. I would use fragrances like cucumber or gardenia...copies of smells that I loved in nature. After a while, though, I found that being around the fragrance oils really started to bother me. I would get headaches if I was in a room with them for too long. It occurred to me that whatever my body was reacting negatively to from smelling the synthetic oils, would not be something I would want to keep rubbing on my skin...or have somebody else rub on their skin. And let me just say, I am NOT someone who is particularly sensitive to chemicals or allergic to things so if they bothered me they would surely bother others.

At that point I started using natural essential oils exclusively in my soaps. True essential oils come from the plants they smell like and can sometimes be VERY hard to extract. For that reason, they tend to be much more expensive than fragrance (synthetic) oils and can be more fragile when mixed with the sodium hydroxide (lye) used to make cold process soap. I found over the years that some essential oils are much sturdier than others (like patchouli), and can help to strengthen more fragile oils (like citrus or florals). I love the clean, fresh scent of orange, lemon and lime, but none of those oils fare well on their own against the lye so I always mix citrus with another oil.

I've also learned that adding a small amount of Castor oil to my essential oils before mixing them with the batch of soap will improve scent longevity. Castor oil acts as a natural scent fixative and is also a great moisturizing oil for your skin. Other natural additives like clays or herbs that are added for color can also help to soak up the essential oils and help them to hold strong against the lye during the saponification process.

The last step for me in improving the staying power of essential oils has to do with storage. Sunlight and open air can dramatically shorten the scent life of soaps. If you have purchased handcrafted soaps made with essential oils, be sure to store them (wrapped in tissue paper) in an airtight container or ziplock bag in a dark place when not in use.

Time to get to work!