Whoo... as part of my inspiration for making some more soaps, I rummaged out my neglected essential oil collection this afternoon and had a bit of a blending session.
Mainly, this consisted of me playing with a range of scent combinations using the cocktail stick method. This is an efficient way to experiment with scent combinations that simply involves dipping a cocktail stick into a particular essential oil and putting it into a ziplock bag along with other dipped sticks - and allowing it all to fulminate for a bit.
So, for example, if I wanted to blend 3 parts Bergamot with 2 parts Rosewood and 1 part Ylang Ylang, I could place 6 cocktail sticks together into the bag, 3 dipped in Bergamot, 2 in Rosewood and 1 in Ylang Ylang. (The only crucial thing is to write on the bag what I put in there!)
Anyway - lovely as this activity is, all of that hard core sniffing made me feel quite giddy, so I gave it an hour and then called time out and flopped for a bit of blogging. Tomorrow, once my nose has had a bit of a rest, I'll give each of my experimental scent bags a sniff to see what I think of them. If I like any of them, they might become candidates for future soap batches - or possibly scented candles.
The longer I keep the bags, the more I will learn about how the blend matures over time... e.g. which of the top notes stood the test of time and which didn't. If a blend turns out to be disappointing or faded, then it is a lesson learned. But quite often I come across blends that smell completely different - and far more lovely - once they've had a bit of time to fester.
All good fun!
The longer I keep the bags, the more I will learn about how the blend matures over time... e.g. which of the top notes stood the test of time and which didn't. If a blend turns out to be disappointing or faded, then it is a lesson learned. But quite often I come across blends that smell completely different - and far more lovely - once they've had a bit of time to fester.
All good fun!
