Soaps of Yesteryear

Soap has been a lot on my mind lately. Since August, I've made more soap to date than was made during the two or three years prior. Right now, I'm sitting here contemplating a honey/beeswax soap with early spring garden flowers as scent -- something like sweet pea, for which there is no essential oil equivalent, though there may be an enfleurage extract available at the cost of an arm and two legs, or as I've done time and time again, by creating a faux with near perfection. I cut my perfume making teeth on faux formulations, from sweet pea to forest violet, and even false oudhs. The Good Scents Company, Poucher, and a lot of practice have gone a long way in making some of these faux quite convincing. So, that's the direction this new soap is going. Honey and sweet pea. Let's see if I can do it. 

Another soap on the list is a traditional Windsor Soap known as *'a stock item of almost every soaper in the nineteenth century'. Apparently, at the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, England, there were 727 vendors exhibiting this particular soap -- 727! The bar that won, from Yardley and Statham, was a bar of Brown Windsor soap that was exhibited again a hundred years later, still in excellent condition. Imagine, a 100-year-old bar of soap that still had its oomph. The scent is tricky because the oils used can be problematic in terms of sensitization, and in the case of sassafras oil, even potentially carcinogenic, albeit, in test animals. This one will have to be reimagined a bit. 

*from the book 'The Art of Soap Making', by Merilyn Mohr, pub. 1979