...and this is why we test...

Ever make a huge batch of cold process soap and find that all of your hard work turns into a clump before you can even pour? Or better yet, you put on a circus act to perform a quadruple swirl pattern only to find out that the entire thing went brown over night? Yup, that's the fragrance, and those results are exactly what we are looking out for in new scents before they hit the shelves so that you don't have to go through the frustration of bad behaving soap.



I've written a post about testing before, but I couldn't resist putting up a photo of these twenty new fragrances that were tested this afternoon. Look at the amazing changes made just by adding scent! It turned out that anything with peach in it separated from the oils and pooled on top. Bamboo, cherry blossom and root beer float all seized horribly (see the one's with the clumpy texture). Vanilla, candied apple, leaf, blueberry, and cotton candy all discolored. In fact, many synthetic fragrances have vanilla in the blend to add a warm note, which means the soap will brown. In my opinion, it's best just to embrace the browning and go with the natural quality of the scent as a theme when coloring your soap. There really isn't much of a fix for browning fragrances in cold process, but you can always leave part of the soap unscented to make a brown and white swirl.

Now I'm super curious as to what these will look like as the weeks go by!