As you may recall,
March was my last Darby Smart box (for now at any rate). I've been trying to get caught up in my crafting room and I happened to take time to do this a few days ago. I wanted to shed some more light on this now that I have completed the craft.
A reminder in case you don't want to click the link:
Loofah slices were included in the box. Until I watched the directions, I thought these were to be used in conjunction with the completed soap, i.e. use the slice on the soap, use the slice on body. Nope, according to the instructions, they make up the soap itself.
You cut the soap base into cubes, place it in a measuring cup and stick it in a pot of boiling water to melt it. I suppose a double boiler would work just as well for this, but as this was my first time making soap from not really scratch, I figured it was best to go with the directions as given.
After about 20 minutes, the soap base was fully melted. Cue adding in and stirring the activated charcoal and the orange extract essential oil stuff. I used half of the essential oil bottle instead of the whole thing. It was more than sufficient. I used all the activated charcoal - about three teaspoons.
Once stirred, pour into mold and ignore. The melting, stirring, mixing process took 20 minutes. The time it took for them to set was about two hours. The loofah floated to the top, so one side of the soap gives scrubby action and the other is normal soap. All in all, it smells great, not overly heavy (again, I only used half the little bottle - see review picture linked above for size of bottle), and the soap is quite nice. It's your basic soap base, which will run you about $6 on Amazon for 2lbs. Activated charcoal is about $2 at Walmart, and essential oil is $5 at Big lots and a loofah, if you cut it up yourself, is $2 (and it will give you more than you need for a set of four soaps). So, if you want to make this yourself, you can definitely do it cheaper than buying the subscription box, but I wouldn't have known the ingredients without it. There are many other things you can add to the soap base - herbs and what not, so you can really take this and make it your own craft.
While I did not like the fact that it wasn't real soap making initially, I like how quick and easy this was, and how practical the end results were. I'm definitely going to experiment with making this and other soaps as the process is a lot quicker than doing it entirely from scratch - but it is more expensive than doing it entirely from scratch as well - so there is that.
