This article aims to help you get the perfect lavender fragrance in your soap – every time! Be sure to also check out my 10 ways to make your essential oil show up in your soap for more tips!

Lavender is such a strong fragrance in the plant, you would expect it to be the ideal candidate for a good, intense soap scent, especially in melt and pour, where essential oils are usually stronger than in cold process. Instead, I’ve found homemade soap often seems to absorb lavender essential oil, so the homemade soap doesn’t smell strong enough.

Eek!

There are several types of lavender; the most common are French lavender and Bulgarian lavender, both of which use the Latin name Lavandula Angustifolia. French lavender essential oil is more expensive but Bulgaria now produces most of the world’s lavender oil, so you are more likely to find this in shops.

There are over 400 different species of lavender worldwide, which can have different potency and fragrance, but the commonest is still Lavandula Angustifolia.

If your lavender soap doesn’t smell strong enough, there are several ways around this, depending on what you’re more comfortable doing.

1. Add more lavender. Be bold! This is the most obvious solution, and probably the one you would try first. However, it doesn’t always work, and you need to be careful not to put more scent in your soap than the EU guidelines tell you to.

2. A better way to get your lavender to smell stronger is to let your melt and pour soap cool before adding the fragrance. Stir it to stop a skin forming on the top and wait until it’s reached about 37 or 38 degrees celsius, then add your lavender oil and pour straight into your soap mould. This takes practice because the soap will solidify very quickly, but adding the lavender at the lowest possible temperature will give you the best scent results.

3. The third way (if you want to cheat) is to use artificial lavender fragrance oil as well as your lavender essential oil. This will give your soap the fragrance you would expect from lavender soap while the essential oil sits in the background with its skin-loving properties. Obviously whether you would do this or not depends on how comfortable you are with artificial fragrance oils. I’m not the biggest fan of them, but if you find the right one they can be good.