Workshop Wonders with Jaime
It is always fun to introduce new soaps and to be able to offer all our Soapy Gnome customers the scents that they love. Did you know that we actually test over 75 different scents every year? Of course, not every scent that we test gets the Soapy Gnome stamp of approval. So how do we decide? Let me share our testing process.
Picking Scents
It can be overwhelming the number of scents that we have to choose from! Companies offer hundreds of different fragrance oils. We also enjoy coming up with our own combinations of essential oils and fragrance oils. The possibilities are endless!
When choosing what to test, we take several things into consideration:
- What is popular?
- Customer requests
- Something different than what we already have
- Price of the scent
- Is it safe to use in soap?
Testing Scents
After we have narrowed down the choices and ordered samples, it is time to test those samples. Testing is very important! Scents can smell completely different in the bottle than they do in soap. So, it is important to base our opinion on how the scent smells in the soap. Besides the smell, it is important to know if the scent causes any reactions in the soap like color change and how fast the soap traces (or forms into soap). If the soap traces too fast for me to get it into the mold, that results in some ugly soap (I may or may not be speaking from a few stressful experiences).
Making the Cut
After all the samples have been tested, we, as a staff, do a lot of smelling and narrowing down. We keep a running list of those scents that we like and performed well in soap. The ones that we like may appear as scent of the month, special holiday/seasonal soaps, or if we really like it, a new regular. The others? You can find those samples in the ugly soaps.
