The Soap Shop – Miner's Gold
/“Waiting for Eureka”
This soap has lasted me awhile, for one, because it's good quality and dense, but also because I've been making it last, not using it all the time, because I'm so intrigued with the fragrance. I can't nail it down. It's outside my experience, it's not part of my olfactory vocabulary. Not that I'm an expert, by any means, but I have been trying a lot of soap. I wonder if the sense of smell can be learned, developed—well, of course it can—but I wonder how much it's an inherent thing. This one isn't subtle, it's pretty strong. I'm fascinated with it because it initially strikes me as repellent, but I keep going back and enjoying it. If I had to guess, I'd say it was “earthy”—which is harder for me to get a handle on than certain floral fragrances. It's not subtle in appearance, either, as it's made to resemble a rock taken out of a mine, with veins of gold running through it, and little chunks of gold here and there. It's really pretty ingenious, the way they made this visually. The gold parts are really pretty metallic looking—it's almost alarming to use it—and the veins running through are present throughout the diminishing of the bar. I even really like the color that's not not the gold part—it's a very deep gray, but it's very slightly sparkly, too, like a nice auto paint job—it's very beautiful, actually.
The soap came with the most minimal packaging, which I'm all for, but there is not much info there. The Soap Shop does have a good website, though, so I'm going to look there to see if I can match up any of the ingredients to my experience. Besides organic coconut, palm, olive, and castor oils, it says the gold chunks are glycerin, and there's also bamboo charcoal and gold mica—maybe this is where the sparkles come from? As far as fragrance, there are oils of oakmoss, lavender, blood orange, marjoram, and fir needle. I really have no idea what any of those smell like, except lavender—and mixing all that together? I'd have to find each of those and isolate them, take in each fragrance, to try to figure out how it works in this soap. I'm just not that dedicated, at this point. Some day I'd like to have a fragrance laboratory! Soon we'll have google-smells, but right now, I'll rely on words. Fir needle, I can imagine, and lavender I know. Marjoram is an herb, and is an aphrodisiac (just read that, I had no idea). Oakmoss is a fungal lichen whose fragrance is a strong, wet, earthy, mossy aroma—forest floor scent (I like that). Also, I just read that it's one of the bass notes in Chanel No. 19, which is my favorite perfume. Blood Orange is an English singer, fond of hats. Okay, that all helps, a little. Still, I swear the smell reminds me of something else exactly, or really close, but I'm not going to be able to figure out what. It probably doesn't really, anyway. I think it's just pretty unique. And right now it occupies that strange and unsettling space that's on the fence between never wanting to smell it again and falling in love with it.
Soap Review No. 78