Making Melt and Pour Soap

I’m going to preface that I don’t sell soap. I make soap for my own entertainment and use.

There are TONS of awesome soap makers out there, and one of my high school classmates makes soap now too. You can find her here.

Anywho, there was a sale a loooong while back on scents and mica, and I bought quite a few that I wanted to try out. This weekend, I was finally in the mood to try them, so I spent a couple of hours playing.

Note that this is MELT AND POUR. Not making soap with lye – the soap I buy is in blocks, already made into soap, I just add scent and colorants. Also, until you try a scent, it’s hard to tell how it will turn out – the scent in the soap is much richer and milder than sniffing the bottle. Also, sniffing the bottle will totally fry your nose, especially if you try several.

No one wants a fried nose.

I’ve made enough types that I’ve started wrapping them in Saran Wrap and labeling them for storage so that our cupboard doesn’t overwhelm and also so I can remember which is which easily.

Here’s the most recent batch:

They’re labeled with how they smell, NOT the actual scents’ names. If you want to know a name, I’ll go and look it up for you. *smile*

The Skittles one LITERALLY smells like Skittles candy. The scent is ‘Taste the Rainbow’ because copyrights, but it smells SO GOOD. The cream and honey smells more like honey than anything, but I think it will mellow.

The lilac one smells EXACTLY like our lilac bush out back or my mom’s lilacs. The essence of night is from the ‘Essence of Nightshade’ scent that I tried in a soap from LunaFae Creations who you can find under her old name here. She’s also on YouTube. She made a nighttime soap with glow in the dark fireflies, and it was so good I wanted to eat it.

Honeysuckles has always been one of my favorite perfume scents, and it reminds me of the wild Japanese Honeysuckle growing at my best friend’s house in Texas, so very nostalgic. The rose is a scent I used for my Mom’s birthday last year, and it’s very dried rose smelling – mellow and rich in a way that fresh roses aren’t.

I love bergamot too, for both tea and perfumes, and a kind friend gifted me a bergamot lotion from Bath and Body works that was so delicious I bought their matching body spray. This scent smells like opening a container of Lady Grey tea – Earl Grey has bergamot too, but not as much. And the Lavender (whoops on the spelling!) chamomile is the first scent I ever made in soap. It’s one you have to go lightly with because it’s SO easy to make it overwhelmingly strong.

So long as I was wrapping soaps, I pulled some of my older ones to wrap. The Mint Rosemary is my favorite so far, and I have it in the bathroom right now. Mint is my all time favorite flavor and scent, so I have quite a few mint perfumes and soap scents. I have an entire bed in the garden devoted to mint varieties ranging from ginger mint to apple mint to orange mint to pineapple mint – you get the idea.

The Pheromone scent I bought to make my father-in-law soap as a gag gift. He got a laugh out of it, and the scent is mint and sage underneath.

The lilac, cream, and honey soap is the soap bar where I poured my excess since I was running out of molds. It’s two scents, one on top of the other, that I thought would go together well.

It’s a silicone mold with a woman, roses, and a wolf. It came out very nicely, even with the scratch on her face, an imperfection in the mold.

I’ve stored them in our cupboard over the toilet – all the soaps stashed up there make our toilet paper smell amazing when we pull it down, which always makes me laugh.