Thursday, 24 August 2023

Soap Making with Almost Autumn fragrance oil by Natures Garden.

 Acceleration - no.

Discolouration - no.
Performance - perfect!
Tiggy's score out of 10 - 6

OOB (out of the bottle) smells like a warm, amber laden fruit. In soap, it morphs a little bit. It soaped incredibly well despite me doing a 40% water discount. By 40% water discount I mean I simply remove 40% of the water required to make the soap. I don’t use soap calc to determine what this amount is, I take the default water amount from soap calc for my recipe and multiply it by 40%, then subtract that number from my water before I mix my lye.

For this soap I used three different micas. I used Dark Orange and Brushed Copper from Mica Moma, and Dark Green from Prima Mica. I left part of the batter neutral for a little added contrast. The colours in my soap could have been a little more vibrant so if I were to make this one again, I would add just a little more of each colour.

The scent in soap (after two days) seems to have lost the top notes of citrus. It has fallen slightly flat. Sometimes I have known scents in soap to change as they cure and even had soap that lost its scent entirely only for it to return nearer the cured date! The only time this happened was with a fragrance called Angelic from Scent Perfique. It’s a dupe of Angel perfume. Smells amazing OOB but totally disappeared in my soap, then after 4 weeks the scent re-appeared. I don’t understand the science behind that but maybe somebody does. If so, please feel free to leave a comment. If the scent changes in any way I'll come back to edit the notes here.

Would I buy this fragrance again? Nope. It’s ok, bit disappointing to be honest. I expected more from it when I saw the picture on the NG website. I was drawn in by the cup of dark coffee and autumn leaves all around only to be let down by what seems like a generic scent. I think it would work much better in candles or melts. Soap can really beat a fragrance up so maybe give it a try in some scented products for the home rather than in CP soap.

I made this soap using my original recipe that you can find here: https://handmadesoaprecipes.com/products/the-best-cold-process-handmade-soap-recipe

The video for the making and cutting of this soap can be found here: https://youtu.be/CU8V6J2dEaI