How to Decrease Scent in Soap

Mixing together oils, water, and lye.

Mixing together my oils.

Let’s face it, even though we all hate to admit it, we all make mistakes. I know a lot of us soapers out there have made a batch of soap, taken a whiff and thought: holy smokes that’s some smelly soap! Don’t think it’s the end of the world and the soap is forever ruined because this is fixable. I’m going to share a couple of ways to fix a problem like this.

I know I am not the only one who has mixed together all of the ingredients for a beautiful soap, just to realize that I had added way too much fragrance oil. Here’s a solution, while the soap is still in the liquid stage quickly make another batch of soap following the same recipe but minus the fragrance oil. Then mix together the two batches of soap and you end up with a beautiful, yet less fragrant, soap.

Soap in the mold.

Adding blue soap chunks to liquid soap.

Now if you’re like me, you don’t realize that you’ve made a mistake until it seems it’s already too late. If your soap has hardened by the time that you realize the mistake it is not too late! This can be fixed with a little time and patience. You can either make a confetti type soap or a mosaic type soap. I think both look amazing! For confetti soap get a large hole cheese grater, and grate all of the over-scented soap. You must make another batch of soap, again without the fragrance oil, then add the soap shreds. If confetti soap is your choice, I recommend the two color method. If both batches are the same color it’s pretty easy to see that a mistake was made and your batch has been altered. In previous experience, I have found that using two different colors not only ends up looking awesome but it looks like it was done on purpose and it was never a mistake at all.

Example of mosaic style soap

To give you an example I made a couple batches myself. I had some blue soap in the lab that I chopped up using an immersion blender with a chopper/grinder attachment. Choppers can be helpful but graters are more readily available. I set the chopped up soap to the side and started making my second batch of soap. On this one I didn’t add any color because I wanted to be able to see the difference between the two different soaps. Once it was finished I poured the soap chunks into the fresh soap, poured it into my mold then waited for it to set up!

Finished soap. Isn’t it beautiful?

So, the next time you make a mistake, don’t be so hard on yourself. Everyone makes mistakes. I can’t prevent you from making a mistake but I can show you how to fix it. Feel free to share some stories below on your hiccups in soap making and what you have done to make it better!