Friday, June 7, 2019

Quick Craft: DIY Foaming Hand Soap From Your Favorite Perfume!

Here comes a SUPER quick craft that's made me unreasonably happy this week. It's also a craft for a very specific circumstance: namely that there's a scent you love that ONLY comes in a perfume or body spray, and that you'd like to have as a hand soap.

Or maybe you just have the supplies around and want to make some pretty, awesome-smelling soap for cheap. That works, too.

Now, I've mentioned before that my one and only true perfumey love is the now discontinued (sob) Vanilla Lace body spray from Victoria's Secret.

(Side Note: if you have an old bottle that looks like this somewhere that still has some goodness in it and that you don't want anymore, please send it to meeeeee:)

I could swear these older bottles smell better/stronger, so now I pay $60 for a bottle that once cost $12.95, ha. This is the scent I wore on my first date with John and on our wedding day, though, not to mention the one I wear 80% of the time, so it's completely worth it to me.

SO, this craft in a nutshell: I made my own Vanilla Lace foaming hand soap!

 
 Isn't it pretty? The orange and gold reminds me of those old bottles. Ahh, good memories.

I didn't use my precious $60 stuff for this, though, because I also recently bought a much cheaper bottle, which looks like this:


This one's from the newer stock, so it only costs about $15 on Ebay. It's lighter and doesn't last as long as the original, but still smells lovely, so I wear it around the house.

I'd just gotten that bottle in the mail when I was about to throw out an empty soap bottle from Bath & Body works:


 

And I got an idea. 

(You see where this is going.)

Again, easy peasy: I grabbed some unscented soap I already had under the sink:


... and mixed it roughly 60/40 with water (more soap than water). I took off the old Bath & Body Works labels, scrubbed the bottle clean, and filled 'er up with my new soapy water mix. (The pump on those bottles is what makes the foam, so you can fill it with any watery soap.)

Next I added about 40 pumps of body spray and 2 drops of food coloring to the mix. The 40 pumps barely touched the amount in my perfume bottle; it still looks full. This gave me a nice light scent, but you may want to add more to make it stronger.

For the coloring I added one drop each of red and yellow, which gave me a gorgeous orange - just like the vintage Vanilla Lace bottles I love.


This was a color test with the gold vinyl. Aren't they pretty together?

The final touch was decorating the bottle. There are lots of fun options out there, but I decided to keep it simple:



I cut this gold vinyl with my Cricut, but if you don't have that option you could use stick-on letters from the scrapbooking aisle, or print your own label and "laminate" it with packing tape to make it waterproof.

Or skip the label entirely and fill the bottom of the bottle with glass marbles, little seashells, plastic Tsum-Tsum figures, or silk flowers, like these: 

 


I'm kind of loving the idea of hunting down old perfumes like Exclamation, Electric Youth, Love's Baby Soft, etc, and making soaps out of them. Too weird? Maybe that's too weird. I bet they'd be fun gifts, though! I mean, most of us probably don't want to wear the cheap perfumes from our teenage years, but a light hand soap of it could be a fun-and-cheesy way to get a blast of nostalgia.

Anyhoo, all that to say, I'm loving my new hand soap:


Now I get a light refresh of my body spray every time I wash my hands, and the foam is velvety soft.

Plus it matches my bathroom, which is even better.

I hope this sparks some good clean crafting for you, peeps! Now, tell me what old perfume you'd turn into a hand soap. Oh! And what kind of 90s era plastic charms you'd put in the bottle, because THAT'S a thing that has to happen. (Or maybe some jelly bracelets? ERMERGERSH, Yaaaassss.)

(It's good that I amuse myself over here, isn't it? ;p)

Happy crafting!

******

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45 comments:

  1. Looks like those daisies originally came from this instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/BC042K4zRwD/

    I've seen beads and things in sanitizer, but never in soap - cute idea!

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  2. Now I want to make one from my old high school scent, Sunflowers!

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    1. I loved Sunflowers! I still have a bottle kicking around somewhere....

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  3. I *just* ran out of hand soap today so this is excellent timing. I wonder how much perfume (as opposed to body spray) I would use. I have several bottles of one that I like but I rarely use.

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    1. You should need a lot less perfume, since it has less alcohol filler than a typical body spray. Give it a shot!

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  4. I actually accidentally did this kind of just recently. Though it was with the creamy luxe soap from Bath and Body Works and cheap aloe Walmart soap. Mixed it and it’s like double the soap for a fraction of the cost! And it still smells the same! Which makes me happy because I love the B&BW stuff but my wallet does not!

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    1. That's why I like to have a bottle of unscented soap around: a lot of the scented ones from Bath & Body Works are SO strong they almost give me a headache, so you can easily cut them by half!

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  5. If Sephora's old Crème Caramel scent were available on eBay, I'd buy it for 5 times the original price, too! But such is the peril of loving an obscure, short-term fragrance. Sigh.

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    1. I know this pain. I still have a body of Candy from the 90s I found on ebay that I'm hoarding like treasure, lol. (Also Creme Caramel sounds amazing!)

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    2. (it *is* so good! So, so good. Why do they not make more not-chemically caramel scents?)

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    3. Try Lush's Salted Caramel soap bar - it smells so yummy!

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  6. Oh! I finally have something to contribute! There’s a site I use occasionally called Surrender to Chance that sells decants - that is, smaller portions of perfumes poured from a larger bottle. Suppose, for example, you only wanted to buy a few ml of a certain fragrance for a crafty project as opposed to spending a bunch of moolah on a full bottle. :) I thought of it because STC has a decent selection of “vintage” fragrances and last year I bought a small sample of Electric Youth (spoiler: it does not smell as good as I remembered). Anyway, it’s a great resource, if you’re planning to experiment with more of these (and my apologies if I’m being an enabler 😆).

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  7. By the way you only need an 80/20 split with water being the 80%. I do this. I take a bottle of regular hand soap in my favorite flavor and one of the B&BW foaming pumps (you can buy empty ones of these but I had them on hand) and make the regular hand soap that would last maybe a month, go for five months. You get just as rich of a lather out of it in the 80/20 split. And while I'm at it, laundry soap is also concentrated. I generally use 1/4 of what the recommended amount is. They have an interest in you running out sooner and buying more so they pad the usage amounts. Shampoo is the same but most people need the lots and lots of lather they get with the regular amounts. If you mixed it with water and sprayed it on your hair it would last a lot longer. Do I do it? No, but mostly just because I'm lazy and use tiny amounts. It helps if you work up a lather in your hands first. Cheapskate lecture over ;-)

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    1. Oooh, thank you, good to know! (Keep the cheapskate lectures coming!)

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    2. I was about to say this same thing! You really don't need very much soap at all in those foaming dispensers. It's amazing.

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  8. Aaugh! Now I kinda want to make hand soap out of my old Vanilla Fields perfume. I haven't worn it in years, but I bet it would make a nice soap scent - along the same Vanilla line. I was also partial to Sand and Sable back in the day, but I can't even remember what that smelled like! Hmm, how do I carve out time for crafting . . .

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    1. OMG, I haven't thought about Vanilla Fields in forever! I wore that in college. Also, thanks for posting about this. A coworker and I have been discussing that SOMEWHERE on the internet, someone's had to figure out the amount of soap to go in the foamy soap bottles. For whatever reason, I love the foamy soap, and finally broke down and bought a $3 bottle of Dove vanilla...something...at Meijer. (B&BW had a sale recently, though, that averaged to $3 a bottle, so I did the splurge.)

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  9. The only perfume I wore back in the 80s was Malibu Musk. The bottle would give some great inspiration for what to decorate with: palm tree beads, teal, pink, and yellow marbles, geometric shapes? :D

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  10. I have several perfumes that I love but actually can't wear because they're too strong, even with the lightest of spritzes...can't wait to try this with them!

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    1. You can dilute your perfume down to a wearable level yourself. Get yourself either some empty spray bottles on amazon, or some dropper bottles for more precise control. Then you can add grain alcohol to the bottle (or vodka if you can't get grain in your area) and a few spritzes of your perfume until it's a strength that you can wear. This way, one bottle of strong perfume lasts pretty much forever.

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    2. This is so great to know -- thanks!!!

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  11. *raises hand* Oooh, Mr. Kotter! -- ahem… sorry -- I think I'm going to find time in my schedule to traipse through a few fancy-schmancy department stores and see how many FREE teensy perfume sample vials I can bring home. Designer hand soap would make nice Christmas gifts, thanks for the idea!

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  12. What a simple and ingenious way to create unusually scented hand soap, especially if you have a tendency to hang onto those almost-empty pump bottles, perhaps hoping that you can use the last drop, yet never do.

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  13. Ooooh. Thanks for the ideas! I'm a sucker for anything vanilla scented, and I've kind of latched onto the Holiday scent from B&BW, Vanilla Bean Noel. Making myself some new foaming hand soaps in that sounds like a delightful idea. :-D And it'll make the hubby happy, since he prefers foaming soaps. Yay!

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  14. I just put a bottle of VS spray like this (but not your scent) in my donation pile but now I may have to go dig it back up!

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  15. I'm still trying to figure out how to make catnip-scented hand lotion. I know that sounds weird, but I have a tortie who is SUPER sensitive to smell, and she won't come near me when I've just put Aveeno unscented hand lotion on. I tried putting a little catnip essential oils in the Aveeno, but it didn't seem to make a difference. Maybe I need more?

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    1. Even unscented products smell. It can be quite overwhealming for animals and people with a strong sense of smell. Perhaps you could ask your cats vet what kind of lotion she/ he uses?

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    2. At the Big Cat Rescue sanctuary in Tampa (wonderful place to visit!), they told us the big cats (tigers, leopards, etc) like certain perfume scents. They actually give them perfumed items to play with! I do remember a favorite was Chanel No. 5; can't remember the others she mentioned. My small kitty loves the smell of peppermint and gets all up in my face whenever I pop in a fresh stick of gum.

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    3. Great idea to ask the vet! I'll do that!

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    4. My male Maine Coon ADORES the minty scent of Glide Cool Mint deep clean gloss. Most of my cats over the decades have loved mint-flavored anything. Cool cats, indeed. (Couldn't resist...)

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    5. OK, that's the second mint reference--time for me to experiment! Thanks!

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  16. My favorite vanilla perfume is probably quite different from yours, but I do recommend it. It's called "The Nuremberg Pudding Incident" from ZOMG Smells. http://www.zomgsmellsshop.com/official-girl-genius-scents-soaps/
    I got the Girl Genius Collected Works Sqee Set of perfumes for Christmas a couple of years ago and this was the very best of a good lot.

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    1. Even though I rarely wear perfume I now feel obligated to go buy a bottle of “The Nuremberg Pudding Incident”....

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  17. What a smart craft! I've heard though, that there's a difference betw food coloring and soap colorings; the first colors your skin, the latter does not. Please be careful when choosing colorants for your soaps!

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  18. They still make Love's Baby Soft, but the bottle is weirdly leaky. It doesn't dribble out or anything, but the perfume evaporates within a couple of months! Still, it's nice that it's available; you just gotta use it up pretty quickly.

    I'm wondering if you used distilled water in the new soap? The reason I ask: I recently was running super low on conditioner, but couldn't get the last bit out of the bottle. I added some water from the shower, shook it up and thinned it out enough to pour. But there was now too much, so I decided to save it for next time. Well, the next couple of showers, I used a different conditioner. About a week later, I used the "almost gone" conditioner again. Afterwards, my head itched madly! I couldn't stop scratching! Finally figured out the water/conditioner mixture must have "gone bad" somehow. Apparently either there weren't enough preservatives in the conditioner or there weren't enough to combat the unfiltered water sitting there in a humid environment getting all nasty. Maybe with soap it wouldn't be an issue, but if I do this with the Baby Soft (and I probably will!), I'm going to use filtered water in the mix. Thanks for the great idea!

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  19. They used to have the knock off perfumes at Walmart "Punctuation... Smells like Exclamation " sort of thing. I haven't checked recently, but I know they still had them a few years ago, because I definitely wore a lot of Exclamation in junior high and now it makes me laugh

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  20. I actually did something fairly recently where I got a bottle of aloe hand sanitizer for work and added a couple drops of rosemary and lavender essential oils. Much nicer smelling than the lavender they use to scent, and it covers up the oddness of the aloe

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    1. I was just wondering if you could do this with essential oils. Thanks!

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  21. Looks like you can get 4 of them for $60 right now! https://rover.ebay.com/rover/0/0/0?mpre=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebay.com%2Fulk%2Fitm%2F264198646523

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  22. When I was a teen (and I'm the same age as you) I had a bottle of Tribe perfume I was obsessed over. I still have one in some old stuff at my mum's place and everytime I wear it I'm reminded of 9th grade

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  23. You know you could always try making your own perfume Jen, with copycat recipes/oils. Maybe try one of these?
    https://rusticescentuals.com/Vanilla-Lace.html
    https://www.camdengrey.com/essential-oils/vanilla-lace.html

    Plus with the fragrance oils you can make your own soaps, candles, etc, etc, etc...

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  24. Cool idea but i've switched to bars of soap to use less plastic. Anywho... just wanted to comment that your food colouring bottles are just like the ones my mum used when I was a kid. So cool!
    Heather

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  25. I do something similar with B&BW gel sanitizers, I keep refilling them with unscented GermX. It is absolutely amazing how long the scent lasts! I have also added a drop of essential oil to GermX and that works well. The scent I LOVED as a teen (and would probably wear it now if I could find it) was Enjoli. Nobody remembers it until I start humming, “she can bring home the bacon, dun dun duh, fry it up in an pan, dun dun duh.....”

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  26. As I started reading this post I remembered the 2 bottles of Love’s Baby Soft I just found in a box and I’m reading and reading thinking oh, man. I’m making Baby Soft soap and then I get to the end and see you thought it was a good idea too! Great minds! Sold!!

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