Sunday Sunset Scent-blogging

Some of you know that I’m a bit of a soapmaker[1] – so I’m fascinated by scents. Today I stumbled across gurl.com, and, fighting my way past the blinking shopping mall ads and the Nair infomercials, I spotted this “My Aroma Personality” quiz:

I took the “scents and sensibility“ quiz on gURL.com
		My aroma personality is… resin Do you have a very strong sense of right and wrong? Do you hold yourself to a higher moral standard than your friends? Then you are probably a textbook example of Worwood’s resin type. Resins strive to live a just and fair life, and hardly ever do anything without taking ethics into consideration first. They tend to have strong wills and are persuasive arguers, and can take comfort in knowing that their way is usually the right way. They usually have a no frills attitude about most things–they aren’t that concerned with the superficial, and are definitely not ones to bling-bling. However, resins’ high principles can sometimes take their toll; they can get burnt out trying to stamp out all of the injustice they see around them. As a result, they may forget to tune out some of the world’s negativity and just have fun. soothing scents for you: Myrrh, Balsam, Frankincense, Elemi, Benzoin What’s your aroma persona?

To prove once and for all that online quizzes are more random than a very random thing, contrast your results on the gurl.com quiz with this “Your ideal scent” quiz at flare.com. Mine:

Filed under: Life, fun, soap

Thursday Soapblogging, May 2007 edition

Further to last month’s effort, I bring you this month’s soapblogging! Once again, rubbish camera, poor light, yadda yadda. Feel free to enthuse about the “artistic” effect.

Raspberries ‘N’ Cream

Filed under: Life, photoblog, soap

Thursday soapblogging

I’ve been making some soap.

It’s like magic, cold process soapmaking. Take one jug of super-concentrated lye solution, about the most corrosive, dangerous chemical ordinary people can buy, though in some areas it’s becoming scarce as part of the War Against Drugs. Add lyewater to one huge pot of grease. I use all vegetable oils, and superfat to around 5-8% to ensure complete saponification of the lye, and so that the final soap will have a good proportion of oil in it as well as the natural glycerine.

Mix with a stick blender.[1] At first, it looks like a roiling, ominous mixture of oil and lye. Probably because it is a roiling, ominous mixture of oil and lye. Over the next 5-15 minutes[2], the mixture emulsifies and opacifies, and you have an opaque creamy coloured liquid. Then it comes to “trace“, which is when dribbles from a stirring implement remain visible on the surface for at least a few seconds.

Trace is where the magic starts to happen – saponification – where the lye and the oil combine to make soap (the sodium salt of a fatty acid) and glycerine. It’s also the panic-stations part, if trace is happening fast: I have to quickly get my colour mixed in if I haven’t already, separate off swirl portions, blend in fragrances, and get the soap into the mould and any swirls added before it solidifies. This is not usually a big deal with plain soaps and diluter lye solutions, but many fragrance oils, some additives (like shea butter), and more concentrated lye solutions (which I use now) can speed things right up.

So bing-bang-boom, I mix, pour, swirl and put the whole thing to “bed”. I prefer soaps that have been through a “gel phase“, so I insulate the soaps in a couple of fleece blankets, adding a heated wheatbag if the day is cool. If I’d like the soap to cure more quickly (and it doesn’t have any milk or honey, which can overheat and “volcano”), sometimes I do the CPOP method. CPOP is Cold Process-Oven Process. I do all of the above, except instead of insulating the soap, I put it in a very cool oven for an hour or so to force gel phase.

Next day I pop the still-soft soap out of the moulds. Let it dry for a couple of days, trim it, and voila! Beautiful, silky, soap that doesn’t make me itch or strip my skin off.

Naked soap: Pure, 100% olive oil, unscented castile soap.

Filed under: Life, photoblog, soap