Day 2 was spent trying a number of the blends I was interested in, tweaking them some during the initial trial and getting feedback from my employees.
My initial scent goals were a nice fresh, clean lemon scent that would be strong enough to hold up in soap and a lavender mint blend.
Below is a synopsis of the ones I tested and our initial feedback.
- blend of lemon, lemon eucalyptus and pettigrain – (everyone liked this okay)
- blend of geranium, lemon and pettigrain – (one out of four liked this. we had a comment yesterday from a customer that this sounded like a great blend for her. It made for a soft blend and my main problem with it was that it wasn’t lemony enough. Perhaps we might refine this to bring out the geranium a little more and use it as a floral blend in the future.)
- blend of lemon, lemon eucalyptus, pettigrain and rosemary – (a big departure from the original blend suggested by Rainbow Meadows but this was 3 out of 4 people’s pick for the lemon scent, which by the way we are planning on calling Lemon Zest.)
- blend of lemon, lavender, pettigrain and lemon eucalyptus – (everyone liked it but it wasn’t as punchy as the one above and therefore I don’t feel that it will come through in the soap as well.)
- blend of lavender, bergamot mint and cypress – (nice but it didn’t seem distinctive enough from our other lavender blends.)
- blend of lavender and peppermint – (three out of four of us simply loved this one. guess you simply can’t please everyone.)
So now it’s the holiday weekend and I’ll let the blends sit for a week until my crew comes back on Tuesday. Then we’ll take another sniff, compare notes and I’ll decide which ones I want to actually make up in a small test batch of soap. If we aren’t really sold on at least one of each type I’ll go back to testing blends again.
In the meantime wishing you all a Happy Thanksgiving Holiday!