A while back I made a batch of soap using fennel, lemon, and orange. The result yielded a very fennel-ly scented soap – really all you could smell was the fennel and while it wasn’t totally displeasing, it just didn’t quite do it for me.* Well, so I also had ordered some anise seed essential oil, which smells very much like fennel in my mind. So a few days ago, I had the bright idea – I’ll make some soap using a leetle bit of anise, mixed with some orange and petitgrain oils to balance it out! The result? Well, it smells awfully similar to that fennel batch. Am I insane? Why must I repeat my actions and expect a different result? Oh, I don’t know. For the record, this was my standard 2 pound batch, using 0.7 oz. of sweet orange oil, 0.4 oz. of petitgrain, and 0.4 oz. of anise seed. The good news is that I’m out of essential oils that smell like fennel. The thing is – I actually like the smell of fennel, but it’s just not working for me in a soap. Oh, I did also add a 1/2 tbsp. of dill for color and that turned out rather attractive, with little green speckles throughout the soap. Unfortunately the pics I took are all fuzzy and bad. But here are some other photos for you.
First, my lemongrass and ginger soap using the nettle leaf powder. The bars are a greenish hue, but the lighting isn’t great so….what can I say, I’m a soapmaker, not a photographer.
I likey. They smell really good!
Oh, and here’s Lucky in my bathroom sink:
Sometimes I just can't get him out of there!
*If you read my initial post about the fennel batch, you’ll notice that I didn’t think the fennel scent was overpowering at the time and that the batch smelled quite nice. Something I’m noticing is that the citrus scents especially seem to fade a bit after the first few days – I found the same thing to be true with this anise seed batch. At first I was like, Wowza! Smells GOOD! And then a few days later, the anise seed became very much overpowering.
Filed under: Uncategorized , anise seed, dill, insanity, the trouble with citrus
