Gingersnap Swirl Soap

My Gingersnap soap

September is already almost gone, and the holidays will be here before we know it! I've been busy making some Christmas soaps for family and friends. (I hope everybody likes soap because that's what they're getting.)

It just isn't the holidays without gingerbread. Every Christmas, I insist on making ginger cookies for the family gathering and then eating almost all of them myself. I can't imagine Christmas without my ginger cookies. 

I also can't imagine Christmas without my Gingersnap soaps. Neither can my mom, who is especially fond of them. I always make sure I include them in my round-up of holiday soaps not only for her, but also because everyone seems to love gingerbread-type scents, particularly around Christmastime.

For my soap, I used Bramble Berry's Gingersnap fragrance oil. It has lots of nice spice notes, like caraway, cinnamon, and cardamom - I loooove cardamom! - with vanilla for some warmth and sweetness. It smells a lot like gingerbread to me. My nose sometimes has trouble picking up spicy fragrances (I can almost never detect pumpkin spice-type scents), but I can smell this one pretty well. My mom says that it is super-yummy, strong, and true-to-scent, so I defer to her nose's judgment. I guess my nose is just silly.

Last year's Gingersnap soap. Meh.

I admit that I am not super-thrilled with how this soap turned out. It was much prettier in my mind's eye. I think it is an improvement over last year's Gingersnap soap, though, and I hope next year's will be even better.

Last year, I attempted to dollop some gold soap on top to make swirly peaks. The peaks didn't quite work out, though, and the gold didn't really come through. (I still have the hardest time with texturized peaks. It seems like they should be easy to make, but I can never seem to do it.)

This year, I decided to use my slab mold and to swirl some gold soap on top of my bars. I think I held back too much soap for the swirling, though. I'm always afraid of not holding back enough, so I end up with too much. And I poured the gold soap in too-thick lines. I think a squeeze bottle would have been cleaner and given me much more control. And I think white would have been a better choice for the swirls - white would have provided greater contrast than gold.

But other than all of that, the soaps turned out fine!

Here is a video of me making my Gingersnap soap:


Next year, I may just make a loaf soap with a couple of gold or white mica pencil lines running through it. Or I could use cookie cut-outs to make little gingerbread men. Or I could make some embeds for my soap, although I usually shy away from embeds because of the extra work involved.

The vanilla in the fragrance oil discolors the soap, so I left my swirling soap unscented. It was neat to watch the soap change from a golden color to a dark brown over the next couple of weeks.

Gingersnap and gingerbread scents seem to be really popular around the holidays. (No doubt why - they're yummy!) How many of you are planning to make, buy, or hopefully receive gingerbread-type soaps and toiletries this holiday season?