I finally won!

The-ugliest-soap-anyone-ever-made-reward has got to be mine.  I made this soap sometime before Christmas and I had high hopes for it.  I thought it would be perfect as a gift to old people as a soap for a foot bath.  I had just gotten some Ginger essential oil and wanted to try it.  I had read that it's warming so I had this brilliant idea to combine it with the eggshells that I so ardently collected during the big bake fest.

When I used finely crushed eggshells in my Alkanet and lavender soap I liked it, but I like very scratchy.  I did however suggested that normal people could use it on their feet.  So I thought it a brilliant idea to do a special foot soap?  That time I had thought that the eggshells would sink to the bottom and form a layer at the bottom with a pumice kind of surface.  But they were pretty suspended throughout the body of the soap.  This time I sprinkled a layer on the bottom, thinking that the soap would soak in and automatically embed the eggshell in the bottom layer.  Well that didn't really work.  The result was a completely dry layer of eggshells that just sat on the bottom of my mold when I lifted the soap up.  What little managed to stick to the bottom of the soap was uneven and not pretty at all.  Fortunately, I had also put some eggshells in the main soap, so it wasn't a total disaster.  I still had a ton of exfoliating power in that soap.

I thought carefully about this recipe, but I can't find the recipe file.  But I wrote down the ingredients so I know it contains: Olive oil, Coconut oil, Soybean oil, Cocoa butter, Honey, Ginger EO and Peppermint EO and then the eggshells.  I think it might be 30% of the first three oils and then 10% Cocoa butter.  I used honey for it's lovely humectant qualities and it also gives a nice lather.  The eggshells need to be very finely crushed, or one can use poppy seeds.

I thought that since the colour was a sort of beige from the honey, it would look good with brown accents so I used cocoa powder for a line and sprinkled a bit of it on top with some brown sugar.
It looked fine in the mold.  But when I took it out to cut it it was horrendously ugly.  Not only was the bottom uneven and ugly, but the line looked dirty and the sugar on top just plain uninteresting.  I quickly shoved it out of the way so that no one would see it and puke.  And promptly forgot all about it.

Until today, I had cold feet, literally, so I went and found it and used it as foot soap.  I guess appearances aren't everything, because it works fine.  For feet.  Not for the body.  I tried it.  The eggshells are just a bit coarser than when I used them before (pounding them with a pestle in a mortar is a lot of work) and they did scratch my legs quite severely.   But that is very good for hard skin on the feet.  The scent of ginger with the peppermint is very nice, not too strong and maybe I should have used more.  Although I can't say that the soap alone made my feet feel warm, I'm sure it helped.  So all in all , not a bad soap.  But boy is it ugly.
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