Potions - soaps

Our class have been finishing off our ‘Potions’ topic this week by planning, designing, making and evaluating their own scented soap.

On Monday we tested and rated different scents such as apple, blueberry, coconut, honey, mustard, lavender, cinnamon and mint. We smelled the scents and gave them a rating out of 5. We then decided who would like the scents in soaps and at what time of year would they be most popular. Once each member in their groups had rated the scents they worked out an average score. The top four scents were then put into a mixing dish and stirred together to see how they blended. For sheer curiosity sake, the bottom four were also mixed together… these didn’t smell good at all. Mustard should not be put in soaps!

Today we had a go at making our soap. We started off by shaving a plain bar of soap into little flakes using a cheese grater. We then added apple, blueberry and coconut with some warm water. The next phase of the operation was for individuals to choose their two additional ingredients to mix in. The choices were from chilli, chocolate, coffee, mint, ginger and almond. The final phase was to roll together the ingredients just as you would roll playdough. When smelling the soaps, the smell of the original bar was still quite overpowering, however, when rubbing the soap on our hands, we could definitely smell the added scents.