I’ve been using a partial drop swirl for all my essential oil soaps for a long time but for my fragrance oil bars I’ve been using a mix of styles – In the Pot, Tiger stripe, Drop – whatever took my fancy at the time of making. As I’m now selling more wholesale soap than I am retail, I’ve slowly come to the realisation that my FO bars need to be of a uniform design too.
It took me a little while to settle into the idea. Soapmaking is such a creative process and half the fun is coming up with new designs and trying out new techniques. I reluctantly came to accept that I needed to choose a style and stick with it, making it synonymous with The Soap Mine brand and making my soaps (hopefully!) instantly recognisable.
I wanted to retain a link between my EO soaps and my FO soaps, while ensuring it was easy to tell them apart, so the obvious choice was to make my FO soaps using a full bar drop swirl.
I’ve been making soap with this technique for a long time – this was the first one I ever made (years ago!), fragranced with coconut FO.
And these are some more recent makes – this is what my FO soap bars will look like for the foreseeable future.
Delicious (Similar in scent to the DKNY designer fragrance Be Delicious)
Oatmeal Milk & Honey:
Welsh Rose:
Blue Belle (Similar in scent to Jo Malone’s ‘Wild Bluebell’ designer fragrance)
I guess the next thing to focus on is standardising the photography :-O
Thanks for reading – back soon!