Lavender & Mastic Soap: First time doing a Secret Swirl

Hello everyone! I've been busy soaping lately and I didn't have much time to blog about it. This is the soap I made back in March and it was the first time I tried the secret swirl or the so called "hanger swirl". It was also the first time I used Mastic in soap, but since then I wrote about couple of other soaps I made with Mastic, but forgot to write about this one that was actually the first.

I used Olive oil, Palm oil, Coconut oil, Shea butter and Castor oil for this batch of soap.

Mastic resins in the mortar

So, the first thing I did was to ground the Mastic resins in the mortar until it turned into powder. Then I set it aside and prepared my oils and lye.

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.