Valentine's Day Inspiration

Surprise your Valentine this year with some handmade aromatic gifts. Heart soaps are so easy with our melt-and-pour soap bases and wide variety of themed molds, colorants, and fragrances. I used dried rose petals to decorate the tops of my heart-embed bars and couldn't resist throwing in some iridescent pink glitter in my marbled soap project.



Create a fun "love potion" spray with Love Spell fragrance oil and water, or add Ylang Ylang essential oil to some warmed up Sweet Almond or Apricot Kernel oil for a romantic massage. Prepare a lovely bubble bath or salt scrub, lotion or lip balm just for the one you love. The possibilities are endless!

Valentine Goodies Continued

Here's another fun heart embed melt-and-pour project with a different twist. Simply make the hearts ahead of time, pour a bottom layer of clear base with your choice of color and fragrance into a loaf mold, wait for it to set up, spray the layer with rubbing alcohol and pour a layer of clear soap on top (hot soap will melt right through the bottom layer and will also be too hot for embeds, so make sure you pour this layer at a lower temp). Now, spray both the hearts and the clear layer generously with rubbing alcohol and place the hearts into the wet soap, spacing them appropriately for hand-cut bars. That's it! Check out Soap Queen's beautiful cold process tutorial of this soap here.


Lip butter is fun, easy, and makes the perfect addition to your Valentine cards. You will need heart lip butter pots, strawberry flavor oil, and cellini red lip safe mica. For a basic recipe, follow these portions and ingredients:

1/4 Beeswax
1/2 Shea butter
1/4 Olive oil

For an 8 oz batch, you would use 2 oz wax, 4 oz butter, and 2 oz oil (by weight). This lends itself to experimentation and personalization with mixing and matching oils. Instead of shea butter, you could use mango butter or avocado butter as a semi-solid oil. For a different liquid oil, try anything from sweet almond to castor oil. The key is to make sure the solids help equal out the liquids so the mixture will be soft and spreadable.

When playing with different colors and flavors, make sure the color you choose is labeled "lip safe" and that you only use Flavor Oils. Fragrance oils are not suitable for lips, though some essential oils such as organic peppermint and spearmint are lip balm safe. Usage rate of flavor oils is 1% to 3% by weight. If you are using a dropper to measure, it is helpful to know that 0.1 oz equals 3 milliliters. Add the flavor oil after all the ingredients are melted and stir thoroughly. Have fun and enjoy passing them out this holiday!

Melt-and-Pour Valentine's Soap

Instead of giving chocolates to your love this Valentine's day, give soap! It kinda sounds like handing out toothbrushes on Halloween, but trust me, it's better. This project goes by much quicker than it looks because we are only pouring thin layers, so they harden up fast. You'll end up with a beautiful, complex looking soap that was actually really easy to make. To follow this tutorial, you will need to grab the following items:

• Rubber heart mold
• Merlot sparkle mica
• Violaceous violet mica
• Titanium dioxide
• Black oxide
• Rubbing alcohol
• Basic mold of your choosing
• Lovespell fragrance oil
• Clear melt-and-pour base
• Fuchsia glitter
  

Let's get started! First, you have to make some little red hearts to embed into the soap. I used the rubber heart mold and merlot mica for this step. You can scent them or not, since it's not the bulk of the end product, it won't make a difference if you leave them unscented. Let them harden up for about 10 minutes in the freezer.


We are starting with a thin, clear layer on the bottom of your mold which will act as a window to your embed, and it also holds your embed in place. I recommend adding just 1 ml of fragrance per layer. Spray both the layer and the heart generously with rubbing alcohol and place the heart face-down in the clear soap. It is best to do this when clear layer is sticky, but not totally hard.



Let that layer set up (which happens in the amount of time it takes to prepare your next layer), melt more soap and add violaceous violet mica and fuchsia glitter and 1 ml of fragrance. Spray before you pour!



Same idea for the next layer, but use titanium dioxide as the whitening agent to your clear soap. I recommend whitening a clear soap over using an opaque base because sometimes layers don't stick together that well when you use different types of bases. This white layer is going to make everything POP! Don't forget to fragrance and spray.




Finally, use black oxide to color the last layer; it creates a nice contrast and makes your soap look crisp and professional. Notice how thin the layers are.

Take the basic idea of this tutorial and run free with it-- play with different color combinations, fragrances, or even try different embeds. You'll love it!