Rose and Mastic Soap

Many months have passed since my friend Carolyne sent me a package of dried rose buds from London, allong with some beautiful hand-dyed silk crepe, and hinted that I might make some rose soap for her, but I was a bit anxious about this project and didn't really feel ready to give it a try until now.

Carolyne likes earthly, natural colors and fragrances, so I've been contemplating how to go about making a rose fragranced soap, how would I structure it, which colours should I use, which oils and butters, which essential oils etc.

Finally, I decided to use Rose Perfume Oil that contains some Rose essential Oil in it (because Rose E.O and Rose Absolute were way to expensive to use), Palmarosa E.O. and finally (after I tested the combination in my whipped body butter) Chios Mastic. 

Olive oil & Aloe Vera soap

There's been a lot of talk on soap making forums about using Aloe in CP soaps and after reading some advice from people who experimented with it I decided to give it a try, cause it was a cheap adventure this time having all of the ingredients in my kitchen and garden. 

Aloe Vera from my garden

As I mentioned before, we have our own olive oil and I have one Aloe Vera plant in my garden. So it was to be a 100% olive oil soap with aloe...

Start making soap!

Some of the soaps I made since the beginning of my soap making adventure

It's been a couple of days since I posted about what to do Before you start making soap and now I owe you the rest of the story. I hope that the previous post hasn't put you off the whole idea, it's really not that complicated, it's just that you really, really have to take safety measures when making soap and make sure to have your basic supplies and utencils at hand. You really don't want to lose time searching for something when you're making soap, because in Cold Process soap making procedure it's really all about timing and precise measurment of your ingredients.