EEEEC: Ginevra di Serafino Visconti’s Scented Soap, Perfume, and Lotion
Ginevra describes her entry into the luxuriation category:
“One of my more luxurious experiences at Faire was a cool shower after a long, hot day, and then going cleanly and quietly to rest. However, I thought it would be still better if I had deliciously scented soap and care products rather than the guaranteed non-reactive stuff I had packed, so when I came home, I tried to make some – it was painful to move, and I was overtired, so these experiments are all really easy, require no special equipment, and only used things I had in the house already.”One of my more luxurious experiences at Faire was a cool shower after a long, hot day, and then going cleanly and quietly to rest. However, I thought it would be still better if I had deliciously scented soap and care products rather than the guaranteed non-reactive stuff I had packed, so when I came home, I tried to make some – it was painful to move, and I was overtired, so these experiments are all really easy, require no special equipment, and only used things I had in the house already.
Perfume
“I love freshening up with rosewater, and when I found this recipe, I thought it would be an interesting variant because I also like the smell of cloves. https://segretipavone.wordpress.com/2014/07/17/two-rosewater-perfumes-1559/. I used rosewater from the Middle Eastern shop on Colombo St rather than making my own because I already had it, and while making rosewater is fairly easy, taking the lid off a bottle already in the house is even easier. I used cloves from the supermarket.
“Using an empty glass jar with a lid I soaked about 20 cloves in about 1/2 a bottle of rosewater and left the sealed jar near a window to soak up the sun for a couple of days to get the 25 hours of sunlight recommended. At the end of this time, I noticed that the colour had changed to a soft yellow, and that I was very happy with the resulting scent.
“Then I poured some of the mix into a small bottle from the craft store to be used to freshen up, and poured the rest into a pyrex jug for part 2…”
Soap
“For an earlier challenge, I tried a recipe from 1559 at https://segretipavone.wordpress.com/2014/03/14/sapone-con-rosa-or-soap-with-roses-circa-1555/ which was easy enough to follow, and which had mostly worked well for me, but.. I wanted something new if I was going to enter it in this challenge, and I thought trying the perfume from part 1 instead of plain rosewater would be interesting. I decided to leave out the rose petals, because in my previous experiment the gorgeous ribena-red colour I had gained from the turned to a golden beige brown as soon as they came into contact with the soap, and I still haven’t found out why. In addition to this I had no rose petals in my house, and wanted to start the experiment.
“I had some pre-grated Castile soap among my craft supplies, which I chose to use in place of cutting soap into chunks as the recipe says to, as it was easier on my wrists and the result would be fairly similar. Although soap type is not mentioned in the original recipe, I thought Castile soap would be good for this experiment, because it was considered a luxury soap for rich humans at the time, and the recipe is mostly unchanged today. I poured some of the grated soap into the pyrex jug mentioned above, and left and stirred them round a few times before leaving them to soak for an hour or so. Because the rose scent had faded quickly in the last experiment, I further deviated from the instructions and added some rose oil designed for adding to soaps at this stage.
“After that, it was a simple matter of scooping out approximately equal amounts, moulding them into balls (if you use wet hands, the soap will not stick to you), and putting them on a plate, again in the sun, to dry out a little.
“The soap does not lather very much, or smell very strongly, but I’m still happy with the experiment, and would do it again.
Hand lotion
“In the same blog as before I found another recipe (https://segretipavone.wordpress.com/2013/08/18/almond-hand-cream-from-the-english-housewife-1615/) that though slightly later than the others promised good results, was simple enough to be plausibly used earlier – and would work nicely with the other experiments scentwise.
“I chose to use commercial almond oil because I had some in my fridge, and I did not have almonds, or the wrists to extract oil from them even if I had some. I put 5 cloves and some almond oil in a small clear glass bottle with a cork lid, and left them on the windowsill for a week.
“At the end of the experiment the oil smells slightly of cloves, works really well, and absorbs quickly. (Cloves have not yet been removed from oil in the photo)”