I have sons like yours. My younger, he totally gave up on my soaps. Likes the pretty fragrances & consistent bubbles he gets from shower gels. He works in the utilities sector which means lots of dirt & bentonite clay, so I get it. My soaps don't make much satisfying lather overall, nor can I afford the kinds of fragrances he likes, nor can he finance them.
My older son LOVES my soaps. Requests them every time he's low on any specific kind he asks for, & luckily, is VERY specific about what he likes/doesn't like. So I get to make salt bars, Bastille bars, even shave bars for himself & some of his friends that have gone feral (
, as they call themselves). I experiment on some bars w/ scents I send him, & he comments, bcs sometimes he "thinks" he wants a certain scent combo from trying it from a commercial product. Then it's something completely different when I make it from an essential oil, in different proportions, & I have to explain top, middle, & bottom notes, etc.
Anyways, sorry I'm rambling. I'm in my ADHD mode. Need a nap despite having had my coffee.
What I was getting at, is that I often grind up the sifted flowers ONLY of the chamomile infusion I make for my chamomile/honey soaps, or further grind my dried, spent coffee grounds for my cappuccino or mocha soaps for him. He likes the exfoliation bcs he has oily skin, & he likes the feeling of getting sweaty when he works out. So my 4 oz soaps w/ some kind of grittiness is right up his alley. I use the Bullet grinder to blend into oblivion the old fashioned oats for his Bastille soaps, & use ½ Tbsp p/ 1 lb oil bcs here in WI is where I'm usually making soap & the humidity is @ 50% avg. I cure the soaps a minimum of 2 mos, because he keeps them in his house. It's a temp/humidity controlled one for reasons, & I KNOW he can't resist to start using at least something from a batch. So I make sure everything's okay to go. He doesn't share very well w/ others unless I make him, except for the shave bars. So I make enough for at least a yr for HIM, & dbl the recipes to make sure certain others get some too.
I hope this helps someone to get an idea of how/why sometimes you might not see how an ingredient "disappears" in a soap, though it's on a label.Those chamomile-honey soaps smell like butterscotch, I've been told, & you can't see the chamomile flowers, but you can see tiny specks of yellowish tan. That's it. And it doesn't lessen inflammation, or clear up your skin of anything, but I know it exfoliates very gently bcs I use it on my skin that suffers badly from eczema. I also don't bathe but 1 or 2x a week.
Like it's been said here in this forum repeatedly, soap is a wash off product. Nothing you add will stay on your skin, except maybe the glycerine that's a byproduct of the saponification process all soap goes through.
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