Swirls and Scents

I love any opportunity to make soap at the store and when we get new scents, they need testing! These particular fragrances already went through their first stage of cold process testing for bad behavior in smaller sample "rounds." Now they are put to the test in larger batches and are beautified so they can join the other bulk soaps to be sold after curing. A lot of great feedback from our customers is super helpful in determining if the scent is something that appeals to the public, which I think is just as important as how well it reacts in soap.


Testing scents in loaves is also the perfect chance to try different colors together and practice swirling techniques. I'm having lots of fun mixing colors together so that I get even more options from starting with just a few pigments. Think about what you can do with only the primaries: red, yellow, and blue. Dig out that color chart and mix away! Rule of thumb is red and yellow= orange, blue and red= purple, blue and yellow= green. These results are your secondaries. Take it another step and see what you get! Try blue and green to get teal, for example. Remember that it takes less blue in the combination with red to get purple. With this in mind, you can achieve many different values of the same color by simply adding more of one color than another in the mixture (a warmer orange has much more red than yellow).

Make sure to do your color experimentation with scents that have been tested and will not discolor in cold process, or have fun trying it with melt-and-pour!