# Need soaping help



## cjennmom (Sep 4, 2010)

I made a "single bar" recipe designed so you can try out new stuff as you experiment with soaping. I make my soap from recipes in the Basic to Basics book I got from Readers Digest back around 1990. Essentially these are soaps containing lard or tallow and are cold process. The recipe I wanted to try was a coffee soap since I've seen it done in several youtube videos before and it really appealed to me. For my tester batch I replaced the water with brewed coffee and then put in 1-2 tsp. of coffee grounds. After unmolding my soap, it doesn't really *smell like coffee so I'm wondering what went wrong. Has anyone else had experience trying to make coffee soap? What does it take to get a good strong coffee scent in soap?

PS, I tried to upload the photo file but kept getting error messages. Seems to let me C&P though??


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## DaisyDuke (Nov 21, 2017)

You didn't do anything wrong. Botanical and add on's are mostly decorative. You should get a faint coffee smell when you use the soap but that is about it. The coffee is mostly for the exfoliating aspect and not the scent. Think of how hot the lye is heating up everything and the chemical processes going on, not much natural is going to survive. If you want it to smell like 'coffee soap' you have seen before you need to add fragrance oil. In my experience anything that has a lingering smell after using is a fragrance oil, or way to much essential oil to be economically viable! Feel free to ask me more about soaping! I made cold process soap for about five years for family and friends ages ago and have recently got back into soaping for sales.


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