Had myself a crafty kind of a day today.
Brunch was apple crumb pie brusviger:
Traditionally this is made a good bit thicker and topped with butter and brown sugar. The yeasted pastry just happens to be a really fantastic base for other flavors. Raspberry is also really good.
Then on to fragrance combination testing:
I get most of my fragrance oils from Bramble Berry and CandleScience. Sicilian Sea Breeze and Champagne (both Bramble Berry) may have to be a shampoo scent. The Orange peel was also really nice with the champagne. Maybe a kitchen hand wash?
You can actually smell the champagne bubbles and it's kind of awesome.
All this was in aid of me finding a nice combination for a body wash bar (currently in freezer). I'm trying some new techniques with it, like including sodium lactate (supposed to help make the bar harder) and sodium gluconate (a chelator that should help with rinsing in hard water and ooof do I have hard water...the limescale in this place is incredible), as well as upping the amount of SCMI (a secondary solid surfactant) and adding it to the SCI (primary surfactant, very gentle) and liquid surfactant to melt. I may wind up with a cream body wash instead of a solid bar because SCMI can do that sometimes, but we'll see. I went with a combo of Amber, Sandalwood, and Labdanum for the body wash since I wanted something that wasn't so exciting or effervescent. I mostly shower in the evening, so I wanted a quieter scent.
My body butter may well eat any scent left on my skin, in any case, because the particular batch of cocoa butter we got seems to like doing that. I used some of it as one of the butters in my body butter.
Last but not least, hand lotion!
This one uses one of my favorite emulsifiers (glyceryl stearate, cetearyl alcohol, and sodium stearoyl lactylate) that makes fairly thick emulsions withoit using an extra structuring agent (like cetyl alcohol). I used a little of a newish product for me, Oliwax. I used it in my body butter and I really liked it. It's an olive-based flake wax that brings some really nice moisturizing. I didn't use a butter (shea, cocoa, etc.) in it since this emulsifier makes pretty thick emulsions on its own. I wanted it to be less greasy (greasy lotions and screens don't mix well), so I used C12-15 Alkyl Benzoate (a lightweight, non-greasy water), kukui nut oil, and fractionated coconut oil for the oil phase. I'm waiting not very patiently for it to cool down enough to be bottled and used. :)
