Musings

I've no new soap to post about... yet.  No worries, more varieties are on their way.

But in the interim, I have a confession to make.  I cheated on our soap.  No, don't get worried there, I didn't cheat with regard to our soap.  I cheated on our soap.  I used other soap.  I know, I know, how could I?  But... see.. ... I still had other soap in the cabinet when we started making soap!  Was I supposed to waste it?  Well, was I?

I didn't think so either.

So... despite the fact that we have one of each variety (I'm not kidding you here) of our soaps in the dishes in the  bath and one of each in the soap dish on the bathroom sink (This is Eric's doing, I tell you.  Yes, we need to test each batch, but do we really need 17 bars of soap in a single soap dish?  And a duplicate in the bath?), I opened and tried a different soap.

This is a commercial soap, a French soap.  It's very pretty and smells wonderful.  It's got ground almond in it.

Mind you, we also have in our soap dishes our own almond soap.  Why haven't you seen it on our website for sale, you ask?  Because our almond soap was our very first batch of soap ever, and while it's perfectly viable soap and we love to use it, we overheated it, causing it to have properties similar to shale.  When we went to cut it, therefore, we got these funky, irregular shapes.  So we could, theoretically, sell it by the pound as Almond Rock soap in person when you could pick the chunks you want, but we can't in good conscience sell it online when you couldn't see in advance what you were getting and no two people would get the same size/shaped chunks.

So we've got this perfectly good almond soap of our own making in the bath.  It's got crushed almonds in it, some finely ground, some bigger chunks.  I love it.  And yet I opened the commercial version, with all finely ground almond in it.  I guess what happened next serves me right.

I hopped in the shower, and started to wash.  It smelled great, and I was happy.  Now, I tend to scrub with soap.  And I love exfoliating soaps and accessories.  I've used soaps with all sorts of things in them - oatmeal, almond, almond shells... I've used scrubs, facial scrubs, sugar scrubs, salt scrubs.  I'm not afraid of things that are grainy.

This... this was different.  The smoothly molded outer layer wore off in the water, as it should, and I got to the almond.  Or glass shards.  It might've been glass shards.  I jumped and looked down, expecting to see that my skin was gone and blood running into the bathtub drain.  The skin was there, blood was not, and I was glad of that.  But holy crow, what the heck was that?  It was the almonds.  I have no idea what this company did to the almonds, but they were sharp.  They hurt.   It scared me.

Glutton for punishment that I am, I've used the soap again.  I've found that if I put zero pressure, it almost doesn't hurt but still kind of does just from the weight of the bar alone.  Ow!  I'm sad, because I want to like the soap.  This is a $10.00 bar of soap, people!  This is good stuff!  But ow.

And no, I'm not writing this to try and compete with them.  Hell, I'm not even naming them.  And I'm not delusional enough to believe that our teensy weensy business, producing soap batch by batch at our kitchen table in a couple of crock pots is any competition for a huge fancy French soap company.  We're two different species entirely.

But I was really surprised.

On another note, an awesome note, Eric found a very cool soap blog.  This chick rocks.  She's in Florida and she reviews soaps.  At some point, we will send her some soap to review.  But so we've both been reading her blog, and if she was still in Brooklyn, where she's apparently from, Eric and I would be looking to hang out with her.  Her sense of humor, and that of her husband who's posted at least once, is reminiscent of the cakewrecks chick.  And if you don't read Cakewrecks, you should.  Everyone should.  It is funny.  Interestingly, the Cakewrecks chick is also in Florida.

I wonder if they hang out with each other.