Soaping with Amber Resin

I will start this post off saying I am an amber lover. Amber resin and fossilized amber, scent or jewellery, I love it all. A few months ago, before I got back into making soap, I purchased a small amount of dark amber and celestial amber resins to infuse for perfuming. Instead of making perfume, the better part of these infusions have gone towards today's batch. I infused one part each resin into five parts each jojoba oil. A nice trick about infusing resin is that you can replace the oils you've used (strain the infusion before adding it to soap) with more oil so you can get more bang out of your resin. I found the dark amber strained infused easier but the celestial amber left more resin behind to infuse again. It should be noted that the way I love this stuff, if I was smart, I'd buy several ounces at a time to infuse in large bottles... Hmm. I think I'm going to do that this fall. Sixteen ounces of amber infused jojoba stashed away seems like an excellent idea.

Amber resin is not to be mistaken for fossilized amber. Amber resins are manufactured with special recipes of styrax or benzoin resins, vanilla, beeswax and secret editions that will very from manufacturer to manufacturer. You can actually buy fossilized amber oil from Eden Botanicals, something I'd like to try at some point but given the cost, for soap purposes, Amber resin is frankly less cost prohibitive for this hobbiest. That said, I imagine the scent would be quite different too.

My celestial amber is smokier and spicier, where my dark amber is sweeter and somehow deeper... I'm not great at explaining it. I've mixed them with patchouli to make a rich, mysterious scent that I will not be sharing. Each and every bar is mine. MINE. I used a lot more amber resin infusion than patchouli, that said, patchouli is a powerful sucker and it may end up being for of a sweet patchouli than a spicy amber soap. That said, I like patchouli so this really wouldn't upset me.

As it happens, I've made this soap, or at least a similar one, before so I know this soap will be brown, or at least a deep tan and no amount of titanium dioxide is going to make it white. Beige? Yes that's manageable but not something I've gone with for this soap. This a mica party. Brown, russet, red, purple, gold and black in thin layers with a swirl on top. Here's the trick to pouring super thin soap, don't over swirl or screw with it. You can't mix it into brown sludge if you use a light touch. Or in this case, let the pour do the swirling.

I keep forgetting to mention this but I am still using maple water as my liquid. It is still behaving beautiful and the bubbles from the bars I made a few weeks ago are delightful. For the last few batches I've also been adding tussah silk. Because I've been using frozen maple sap, the silk is not able to dissolve in the lye solution, it doesn't get hot enough. So I've been heating a little bit of the maple water separately, and adding my silk to that. It works pretty well.

Yes that is my laptop in the background; I was in a heavy metal mood today. There's always something playing in the background when I make soap since I love me my background noise. I didn't want to do a precise tiger swirl so I'm not sure how to describe my swirl choice, tiger turned drop swirl? Who knows.

The top. The scent isn't as strong as I'd like, I was a bit stingy but that's alright. It's amber and I'm happy. I found a wholesaler where I can get 250g for an excellent price and will be purchasing it in a few months. Then I'll probably make a whole series of amber soaps... Maybe then I'll share.