Soap

It had to happen sometime.

One morning, not terribly long before he stopped driving altogether, my grandfather was in a car accident on the way to coffee. He hit a car while driving less than 10 miles an hour. The vehicle he collided with was stopped in the middle of the road. The driver of the stopped car was also an octogenarian.

It must have been the slowest, hard-to-not-watch accident ever.

This is me with soap. We had to collide at some point. Who knows if we will stick.

I love soap. I love really, really, really, good soap. I love soap with super nice oils and the occasional uplifting fragrance that wasn’t assembled by a bunch of chemicals and compounds.

Soap is intimate. It’s been a while since I’ve found a soap that I’ve wanted to be intimate with. There are a lot of fragrances out there.

So far, the soap experiment has gone well with a good, long list of mistakes. The first batch was heavy on the Tamanu oil and full of wonder. I’m pretty sure I did all of the things you’re not supposed to do.  Even so, it had the perfect balance of lather and creaminess.

The second batch was smooth, its color is wrong on a primal level (who knew you could recreate the color of baby poop?), and it’s full of overcorrections. It has to be one of my favorite soaps ever, just for its ability to survive.

The third batch is unscented. Made with Kokum butter and Pracaxi oil, it looks promising. But I forgot to tap the mold, and there are little bubbles on the surface. We’ll call it rustic luxury.

The fourth batch was made with Ucuubu butter and scented with mint and bergamot essential oils. It’s the color of maple sugar, and unfolding it is going to be an adventure.

The fifth batch is attempt number two in creating a scented but not too scented bar of soap.

Here’s what I’ve learned:

There’s a reason why many companies use a premade melt-and-pour mix.

Ucuubu definitely likes to saponify.

Undecanted hydrosol will definitely speed saponification.

Soapmaking = so. much. fun.