Spiced Apple Cider Soap

Let me just start by saying that I freaking LOVE the holidays. Ever since I was a wee laddy I've always found something magical about Autumn. It's my favorite season, and always has been. I love when the leaves start to fall and the wind has that first bit of bite to it. The trees where I grew up in Texas mainly went from green directly to doodoo brown, but the season was and still is the most fun for me.

So, since I love Fall and the holiday season, and I also really enjoy soaping, my big idea this year is to send out some of my soaps to friends and family for the holidays. I know - groundbreaking, right? I got some holiday scent fragrance oils in the mail this week from Brambleberry soap supplies and had to try one out immediately, being the dork that I am.

For those non-soapmakers (which is basically like, well um, most people), Brambleberry is the Amazon.com of soap making. They're basically the one stop shop for anything soap related. They've got essential oils, herbs, molds, colors... you name it, they've got it. I picked out a few fragrance oils for this year. Pumpkin Spice (they didn't have a pumpkin pie scent, boohiss, but this one is kinda close), Woodland Elves (basically just a dorky fun name for evergreen scent), Applejack Peel and Spiced Apple Cider. After a quick facebook poll to make up my mind, I whipped up a batch of the spiced apple cider. Like most of my soaps, these are 100% coconut oil.

Concerning scents in the soap making world, there are generally two schools of thought (though there's a lot of overlap with individual soap makers). In one corner we have the essential oils. These are oils distilled directly from various herbs. Lemongrass, lavender, tea trea, eucalyptus and orange are examples of really popular essential oils. They've been around for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years, and are really fun to use but can be a bit pricey. I prefer essential oils because they're all natural and in many cases therapeutic, but one of the drawbacks is it's difficult to mix them to create a specific smell like pumpkin pie, for example.

In the other corner we have fragrance oils. These are synthetic oils that reproduce an enormous variety of scents. There are literally hundreds, perhaps thousands of these suckers. You can get anything from Christmas Tree to Mango Pinapple Salsa to Shoe Leather. Seriously, I think I saw a shoe leather one once. Anyways, these are great for specific scents but they are lab made, which means people with allergies to synthetics (or extremely sensitive skin) might find these undesirable. A plus, however, is that you can use a lot less of a fragrance oil to get your desired scent. With essential oils you sometimes have to load the soap up quite heavily with them.

There are some soap makers who exclusively prefer one school or another, but from what I've seen so far most soap makers use both. In general I fall under the essential oil category, but I have no clue how to make specific holiday scents with those so voila - I bought me some FO's (short for fragrance oils).

I added some merlot, orange, and silver mineral pigments to the moisturizing oil for color. I was aiming for a warm merlot brown, and I basically got that, but not as dark as I would have liked. It's kind of a warm wine color, even though it looks pink in the picture (I really need to stop using my cell phone camera and get some better lighting in the near future).

This batch went well, but since my apartment isn't huge, and FO's are strong, I got a bit of a headache while making it. Complete apple cider overload. The soaps came out smelling great, but I had to air my apartment out a bit before I could stand being in it for very long. All in all the finished soaps look and smell nice, I think.