ENTRY THREAD Feb 2025 SMF Challenge: Scrub-a-dub-dub!

[AliOop]

The Entry thread for the Feburary 2025 SMF Soap Challenge is now open!

As a reminder, this Entry Thread is for challenge entries only. All comments or non-entry photos should be posted in the General Challenge Thread.

The first photo in your entry thread post will be used as the entry photo for voting. The photo must include at least two bars from the same batch, and a list of all exfoliants used. Additional photos and explanation of your process are not required by are quite welcome. Please refer to the competition rules in the General Challenge Thread if you have any questions about the challenge requirements. All entries are subject to these deadlines:

* This Entry Thread will close on February 23, 2025 at 11:59 PM GMT.
* Voting information will be sent via SMF Conversations (messages) to all eligible participants shortly thereafter.
* The voting survey will remain open until February 26, 2025 at 11:59 PM GMT, or until all votes are in, whichever is sooner.
* The winner will be announced by February 28, 2025 by 11:59 PM GMT.

***************************************************************************

Note: all times listed above are Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). It is your responsibility to convert times to your own time zone. You can use World Time Buddy or a similar converter to assist you with that.

 

[ackosel]

My entry is an orange/coffee scrubby soap. The whole batch is scented with an essential oil slurry with sweet orange, cedarwood and litsea cubeba. Exfoliants are:

2 tsp. PPO of coffee grounds in the top half.
2 tsp. PPO of coarsely ground orange peels in the bottom half.

The bottom is paprika-infused olive oil for the orange color, 100% goat milk for the liquid. I was so excited that I didn't overmix the batter, but I poured the orange at a little too thin a trace. The orange peels didn't stay suspended as well as I would have liked.

The top is milk-in-oil method. About half the liquid is goat milk mixed into the oils. I whizzed dry, unused coffee grounds in the blender and added them to distilled water to make up the other half of my liquid. Then I added the lye and let the heat brew the coffee. Once again, I was able to control trace and keep it thin enough to separate small cups of cocoa powder and activated charcoal accent colors for a secret feather swirl attempt in the coffee portion. I started pouring at too thin a trace again, but was interrupted by a small emergency. By the time I came back, the soap had come to a perfect consistency for pouring the rest of the design. I made one down/over/up pass with a hanger and topped the loaf with scrapings from the colored portions for a chopstick-swirl topping.

 

[Vicki C]

Hi folks! I figured you’re all missing me posting more stone soap (ha ha, no, I’m sure you’re sick of it, too bad, I’ll never stop ) so I made a scrubby soap with coffee grounds and two coffee fragrances, which smell amazing. I didn’t add any color other than TD because I wanted it to look like creamy coffee and I knew the fragrances would darken things up. There are also some brown and white soap shreds in there to give it a mottled look.
Super fun challenge @AliOop! Thanks for hosting ️

 

[2lilboots]

I used my lard based soap recipe with goats milk. NG Hot Pink Lime fo. I used mad micas orange, blue, and green. I put 1.375 oz powdered orange peel in the orange colored portion. 1.375 oz powdered pumice in the blue, and 1.375 oz powdered walnut shells in the green. Did alternate pours and swirled with my small silicone whisk.

 

[akseattle]

My entry is made with my usual recipe I've been working with of lard, tallow, coconut oil, shea butter, castor oil and instead of 22% olive oil, I used 17% sunflower oil and only 5% olive oil (to get a whiter soap). I increased the coconut oil from 20% to 21% to make it a tiny bit more cleansing. My exfoliant was sand that I brought home from Celestun, Yucatan, Mexico last January 2024.

I made this for my older son who has been buying a soap from LUSH that has Brazilian sand and fragranced with litsea cubeba. That LUSH Sandstone Soap is the last picture on the bottom. So, I was going for a dupe.

My first attempt was on February 8. I used only 2 teaspoons of sand in 600 grams of batter ( I was afraid to make it too exfoliating...). My son came home for a visit and I said, what do you think? His comment was looks good, smells great, but where's the sand?

So, my second try on February 15 has 3 oz of sand for the same 600 grams of batter. The first try was yellow, grey and white (uncolored) with Lemon Slices FO by Rustic Ecsentuals. I wanted a color different than grey to be able to distinguish. My son asked for red, so this is yellow, red (red rose mica that is more of a raspberry color), and white (uncolored.) He preferred a Lemon Verbena FO by Rustic Ecsentuals so I used that instead.

I used only 1/4 teaspoon of Lemon Yellow mica for 300 grams of batter in my Feb 8 attempt. However, in this batch, with the sand, it was pretty beige, so I added another 1/2 teaspoon of Lemon Yellow mica. I used only 1/8 teaspoon of the Red Rose mica to 150 grams of batter and decided the color was fine even though not exactly red. Even though there is 150 grams of uncolored batter, I kind of got lost. The parts that look light are probably low on sand.

So, my entry is the yellow, red and white soap on the right.

I still don't see the sand, and I haven't tried the soap, so I'm not sure how exfoliating it is or is not. But, since I'd been meaning to make this soap for the last year, I was glad this challenge came up and and got me off my rear end. The lemon verbena smells really good! This was my first time using both the Lemon Slices FO and the Lemon Verbena FO.

I made only two attempts with sand, one batch with poppy seeds, and one that was supposed to be loofah but I forgot the loofah!!! My poppy seed soap should be reasonably exfoliating and more successful than my sand soap. But, since I've made soap with poppy seeds on multiple occasions in the past, I've entered the soap that was actually my challenge. On another note, I got lots of practice with a hanger swirl this month !

My entry here on the left. My 3oz of sand from Celestun, Yucatan

My inspiration: LUSH sand soap
Although, to be honest, my son was my inspiration

NOTE: I understood Lush's soap contained Brazilian sand. I was fairly certain when I read the ingredients list on my the packaging on my son's soap, it said "Brazilian sand." That is why I carried sand all the way back from Mexico, to try to get as close to Brazilian sand as possible. On reading LUSH's website in order to get the photo of my inspiration, it says there soap is inspired by "Brazilian babes that rub sand and oil on their bodies..." The soap is made in Canada!

 

[justsomeguy]

With the help of @earlene and @Zing I made a blacksmith/mechanic/gardener soap.

13oz of oils. 85% HO sunflower, 10 coconut 76°, 5% castor. 6% borax. Half the soap has espresso ground coffee beans. A quarter colored with blue iron oxide. The other quarter colored with black iron oxide. I forgot the fragrance

I meant to do a hanger swirl but couldn't find my gear tool. Then when the house did cough it up it was too late.

 

[artemis]

Pax is the only one of the kids that has a preferred recipe. He is also my head landscaper! That will change in August when we ship him off to college, so I decided to make this one for him.

My usual is lard, olive, coconut, and avocado. For Pax, I add Shea butter. This time, though, I also added cocoa butter! Ooh la la!

For the rest of it, I added borax according to @earlene and put just about every scrubby thing I have: cornmeal, coffee grounds, orange peel, colloidal oats, poppy seeds, activated charcoal. Also, buttermilk powder. I scented it with his favorite White Eucalyptus from Candle Science.

It is surprisingly not very scrubby. Also surprising-- Omni loves it. She never had a soap preference at all. She has commented on this one every time she's used it.

 

[Mobjack Bay]

Oops, forgot this is a short month… Between traveling and having a bad cold, I’ve run out of time to make another soap for this challenge. Here’s the tiger stripe scrubby soap I made earlier this month. The colorants (scrubbies) are Virginia red clay + cocoa powder (ground walnut shell), Brazilian red clay (fine beach sand), yellow illite clay (fine pumice) and white kaolin clay (no additive). I used 1% scrubbies = 5 g of scrubbies per ~ 500 g of batter, aloe vera juice in place of water and EOCalc’s Herbal Citrus blend to scent the soap (orange, rosemary, lavender, peppermint and litsea). The soap feels plenty scrubby, with the walnut shells dominant, but the shells don’t feel sharp, which is good. Thank you @AliOop for getting the wheels turning and running a fun challenge.

eta: here’s a close up of the soap texture and the highly visible ground walnut shell.

 

[Servant4Christ]

For this entry, I used my current favorite high lard recipe and added a mountain of confetti shreds from a special order I made this past Christmas. I ground some jasmin rice in my DIY coffee grinder to use as my exfoliant. I can feel it when washing, but I cannot see it. I forgot how hard it is to see light colored fine exfoliants in my white base recipe. Scented with Nurture's Avalon.

 

[CLMP]

Hi everyone I decided to make a mechanic soap for my son he is in to fixing motorbikes and he has been getting black finger prints every where. So I came up with a recipe on line and changed it a little and made it the color and layers my son wanted it was a really nice recipe. Well this soap caught me off guard and I made a big mistake. I made 3, 1 pound batches so I started heating my oils and lye. Everything was ready so I poured my Fragrance my son wanted and pumice in it. It was soap on a stick. So now I'm stuck with 2, 1 pound batches that are ready to go and they are going to go fast. I poured and stirred as fast as I could and poured, I had 5 sec to get it in the mold. I don't know how but some how I pulled it off. So I put it in the oven and poured more oils and additives for 1 pound batch pulled my mold out of the oven and poured the last layer and put it back in the oven. So some how I saved it. So I made a mechanic soap with Polo green like fragrance from Botanic planet, for scrubs I put 1 tbs of pumice pp and 1/4 tsp of red sandalwood powder pp. I soaked the pumice and sandalwood powder in the FO. I used dolphin blue mica from Candora soap in 2 layers then I added titanium dioxide to one batch of blue and the 3rd color I used Gold Pearl mica from suds n' scents with just a tad of titanium dioxide too. I also added some shea butter to my recipe. All in all my mechanic soap turned out pretty nice but wow that was a very hard batch to work with I hope my son likes it.