Soap: Fit the Eleventh (ex Arte, eat your heart out)

The thing about trying to Frankenstein a lavender soap out of bits and pieces of a bunch of historical recipes–

Photograph of a metal bowl of whole cloves on a digital scale.

Figure 1. An ounce of whole cloves.

–recipes that were already missing several crucial steps (or iNGREDIENTS)–

Photograph of the inside of a wooden mortar filled a third of the way with a light-brown, slightly clumped power mix.

Figure 2. Ground cloves, orrisroot, and gum benzoin mixed in the mortar.

–because the authors just assumed you already knew them, so why repeat themselves, everyone already knows ALL THAT–

Photograph of tiny curls of shaved, dried white soap partially mixed with a brown powder in a wooden mortar, the long, thin handle of a wooden spoon sticking out of it.

Figure 3. Seven ounces of shaved and dried Nabulsi soap added to the previous powder.

The thing about this whole apothecary gig is… is that I actually am getting comfortable working with these ingredients and these processes and these scents and these tactile sensations under the curved press of my pestle, just like all the books say, the living skills of practice and experimentation and experience cut down to a simple shorthand, just “ex Arte,” just “according to Art”…

A photograph of a slightly clumpy white and brown mixture in a wooden mortar.

Figure 4. An inglorious mixture, doomed to failure.

which means I could SENSE from the

SECOND

GODDAMN

P H O T O G R A P H

THAT THIS TRASH GREMLIN WAS NEVER GOING TO DRY PROPERLY.

Theories! in the Workshop

1. The best iteration so far was 2.0 (the glow-up from the, ahem, “shit soap” 1.0). Every written version of my recipe says to use one ounce of cloves, but when making 2.0 did I accidentally only use one gram?

2. The pre-brought powdered gum benzoin seems… okay, probably. I am, however, highly fuckin suspicious of the powdered orrisroot.

A top-view marketing photograph of a cream-colored, clumping powder.

Figure 5. Who are you, powdered orrisroot. What curse have you laid upon me.

A grim order of actions

1. Work the soap and powder mix together in a mortar for a while to see how close you can get to the right consistency before adding the rosewater.

2. Stare into the dark soul of this soap as you twist the pestle.

3. Stare at the bottle of rosewater as it sweats beside you.

4. Stare at the soap again, which will appear to have somehow moved. Closer.

And as we all know, I am a paragon of patience

I sadly did not not get a final photo before I left the workshop, but:

These lavender wash balls were darker than my best glow-up batch.
I kept them spheres, lest the falafel shape be a Trap.
They did roll up very nicely, and made the usual 5 balls. I used only a splash of rosewater to bind the soap mix, so perhaps that would save us from the horrors.
But the scent, I feared, was Not What It Should Be.
The only thing I could do now… was wait.

Three days later

A photograph of an aluminum tin with five brown, speckled, rounded balls of soap, slightly shiny in the light.

Figure 6. Suspicious wash balls of questionable quality. I DO NOT TRUST YOU.

Nine days after that

I returned again to the workshop to visit this batch and the thing was… the thing was, they didn’t look bad, necessarily.

A close-up photograph of dried, brown, speckled balls of soap in an aluminum tin.

Figure 7. Balls of soap that were, theoretically, lavender in nature.

They’d been drying over a week. They should have been rock solid. But the weather has been garbage. And these fakeys had the very slightest amount of squish.

A close-up photograph a hand holding up a brown ball of soap with a significant crack.

Figure 8. Local apothecary experiment decides to give up on life, love, structural integrity.

But I will also say that the most disappointing thing was that I–

I did not appreciate the smell.

There was a nice slice of clove that hit if you gave it a moment, but overlaying it all was the dampening, dusty, unpleasant scent of what I was fairly certain was that goddamned powdered orrisroot.

AND THIS MAY WELL BE UNREASONABLE but I had grown to expect a certain cookie-scented lifestyle and therefore I was not sure at all that this batch, even if it dried completely, would do.

(…And even with the later, let us say, injudicious application of a low-heat oven, it never did. As I predicted. From the second photograph.)

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