Winter Progress

It seems a very long time since I launched the Victorian Soap Project and set this blog up, and I'm sorry I haven't put an interim update up. I haven't been idle though!

I was delighted that the crowdfunding bid not only reached but exceeded the minimum sum we'd asked for, the funds came through a month or so back and a little bit has been used already to buy in raw ingredients for the samples stage and the rest are safely in the bank to cover the chemist's fees when we get the certification done on the new recipes.  A huge thank you to everyone who invested in this project, we really couldn't have moved it forwards without your help!

I've been steadily working through some original Victorian texts on soapmaking and collating information about ingredients, methods and preferred fragrances- I'll be doing separate posts on each of those over the next few months.

I've also been testing what I hope will become the main base formulation for the 'new' range of shaving soaps. With any modern interpretation of an old recipe there are always compromises that have to be made, and in my case its a matter of making sure the ingredients are these well represented in the historic record but at the same time a combination that works well today to give a soap that feels nice on the skin of the modern user and which will meet the approval of the cosmetic chemist who needs to sign off each new recipe as fit for use today. Fortunatley the Victorians seemed to like much the same textures as my modern day testers do, so I'm confident the final results will be a good reflection of Victorian tastes and methods.

I tend to use my family as guinea-pigs, so most of the boys in the family got soap like this for Christmas

Gareth has also been working on shaving brushes, these are boar bristle so have a nice firm texture, and the handles are boxwood (the dark one in the soap picture above was a bit of ebony relaimed from some dead furniture) . Aren't they nice!

More soon, now we are into the New Year I should make rapid progress, and be updating this blog a lot more often. I'm hoping to be contacting everyone who invested in the project fairly soon to find out which of the proposed range of soaps you'd like in your reward package, hopefully thats something to look forwards to.