Teach Soap

Well, we have a lot of Rastas & other "free" folk who come through in tourist season...

So the pharmacy owner has asked me if I can come up with a green cannabis scented soap.

Since UY legalized, you can now buy it in pharmacies if you are a registered card-carrier for medical or recreational use, so not a "weird" question from a pharmacy here.

I'm thinking I can get the leaves from any friend's garden, dry like dandelion, etc... no dramas. If I do it HP, they can be the colorant... or I can include & use spirulina for colorant. But NO WAY am I going to try to put any absolutes or resins or anything into a soap for the sheer EXPENSE. Hemp oil is not available down here, and I'm at my max # of imported boxes for the year. IF I can pull this off this year, I will include hemp oil in next years cannabis soap.

I've noticed some fragrance places have a cannabis type scent, one being "Cannabis Rose" from a supplier I cannot remember. The issue is shipping is very expensive for me and there's no time to try fragrances to see if I can find one that really does smell like weed... So, I have to get the right scent & do it right the first time, or no-go until next year's tourist season.

Surely one of you veteran soapers has had such a request and has found a scent that smells like the "real thing."

Pretty please, could you share info with me (name, fragrance house)? Hopefully, I can find a supplier who ships to Uruguay.

Any info on pot leaf cookie cutters for a "topping" or "embed" would also be welcome...

I can scrounge enough seeds locally & grind for exfoliant, I'm sure...

Thanks in advance, ladies.

Get out of my head girl, I was just thinking the same thing. I'll report back if I find anything. And leaves will do nothing, you need mature female flowers. Plus scent/oil extraction from plants is not really an "at home" thing. ETA: one source says 50lbs of flowers for one ounce.

If its legal, you need to find someone doing the extracting to buy oil from but as you said, WAY expensive.

AprilPrey -

They say great minds think alike, eh? I was FLATLY INFORMED by several neighbors that they, also, are expecting a cannabis soap. No dramas, I love challenges.

The hemp seed oil for the recipe I was gonna buy online, but hafta wait til next year, because I've hit my 5-package tax-free limit for this year. For this, my 'Merican GF will order & it'll come to me because the post office lady doesn't know her... All mail in English gets dumped with me.

For the scent, I MUST go with an FO, I'm afraid... I've seen a couple, I think at NG, and the name Cannabis Rose comes to mind. But at the cost of shipping, I can't play around. Once it gets here, I'll have to pay another 60% tax to get my box, pretty please... But apparently, people want it. I just want one that smells like the real thing, not something some person made that smells like what they "think" it should smell like... if you follow. (It's late, I'm tired, sorry.)

Laughed my butt off about 20 years ago when a friend put 1/4 lb of good Bowie County Homegrown (Piney Woods Sensimilla) into a soap & ended up with 6 lbs. of brown glop! Legal or not here, it's expensive if you don't grow yer own, and I'd never waste valuable medicine in a soap. That said, PM me if you want directions on making concentrates, etc... Um, I'm kind of an expert at that & it's not all that hard, several different methods & not any more dangerous than mixing your own lye.

I was gonna do a mini HP batch, as I do have a 6" wide mini crockpot I brought down for an EO diffuser pot for me... I reckon I could do a little bit of testing to see if I can get a colorant from the dried leaves after the cook is finished, added with SF & fragrance just before moulding. Want to see if they stay green like catnip does or if they get nasty. What do you think?

But with other flowers (still chuckling) I've had really good luck extracting honeysuckle, etc. with plain old tallow on some old window glass from a house that fell down. Granted, not for anyone with a REAL job, but we have no electric or anything out there & I like to fool around with garden stuff. I've done roses, vanilla beans, geraniums, gardenias, etc., and it has not taken near as much as I was afraid it would... I shamelessly went to homes with the best gardens when I first got here & got permission to take "useless" weeds like dandelion & plantain out... Then later gifted them back soaps with these infusions... Then, one lady wanted a gardenia soap. When I was getting cactus tunas, she picked her gardenias bare!!! I was kinda daunted at the idea of processing 50 lbs of petals, but I really only used enough to loosely fill 4 big paper grocery bags... Granted, it wasn't as concentrated as commercial stuff, but VERY nice & IMHO, well worth the trouble. I used it in HP soap as a superfat added after the cook & it was delicious.

Right now it's winter here & I have calendula infusing for my body butters. I put the tallow on stackable glass dinner plates, cover with flowers, more tallow, then stack them on a wood square just outside the corner of the fireplace. In 2 days, they're done & not much work at all. You gotta use DRIED flowers & petals & stuff, because the moisture from fresh petals will lead to mould... Each plate gives you about 4oz of nicely scented tallow to work with.

Why not try it & see how it goes? It's summer up there & all those lovely flowers you can harvest. Take the roses just as they fade but before they're sunbleached. You'll be surprised how easy it is. You don't need much for lotion or body butter, maybe 1/2 of 1 plate.

For me, it's so cheap & accessible, I kinda gotta do that just now. We just had a big Brazilian tourist week and it was amusing how the faces of the vegetarians fell... Guess I'll hafta try to do it with coconut oil, but doubt it will stick the scent as well as tallow.

Thanks heaps, dear. Navigating online is a real PIA for me, especially now my eyes have gotten slack in their performance. I'm sure I can trust your nose to find a good one!

All Possible Blessings!

I got "Cannabis Flower" fragrance oil from Nature's Garden at least 2 years ago, so I don't know if they still have it. But it smelled just like the real thing. Don't ask me how I know.

You girls are awesome...

I had read the descriptions at NG for Cannabis Rose & Cannabis Flower, but until you've actually DONE it in a soap... and unless you DO know... well... Let's just say I've fallen for adhype before & can't afford to waste a peso ATM.

Hugs to both of you!

I know this is a bit old, but I thought I'd comment anyway.

I'm new to soaping, but one of the soaps I made was a beer/hops soap using a hop infusion. The resulting oils smells very dank and might be a good choice for replicating a cannabis scent. Hops and marijuana are closely related, botanically, so it stands to reason.

If you decide to try this, go to a brewing store or online and purchase hop pellets not flowers. The variety of hops matters, too. Hops are rated for brewing by how strongly they bitter a beer, but that doesn't matter for this use. You want to choose a hop variety with a strong smell. To mimic cannabis, I would choose a variety like Galena, Cluster, Centennial, or Cascade (as a last resort). You do not want a hop described as "noble" but those more likely to be characterized as "rough" by brewers.

To get good carryover of the hop scent, you will want to use a lot. I only used 5% in my experiment and there is just the barest hint of the scent. If I were to try that again, I would increase to 30% or so - or even all the liquid oils - infused with hops. You will need one ounce of hop pellets for about 4 oz of oils. I did a warm infusion by putting the hops in a mason jar with the oil and setting the jar inside a crock pot of water for about 6 hours. Hops also absorb and hold onto a lot of oil (or water) so expect to lose about 1/3 of the original oils if you wrap in cheesecloth and squeeze the oil out by hand. If you have a cheese press or similar mechanical help, you might get that loss down to a quarter of the original.

The resulting oil is very, very dark green and smells wonderfully of hops/cannabis. It didn't seem to do anything untoward with trace, but I'd expect it to color a soap green if you used enough to get a strong smell. My trial soap was already dark brown from the beer, so I didn't see any green - not to mention I only used 5% which isn't enough for your purposes.

Thanks so much, BrewerGeorge!

And hubs makes his own beer, so... logical next step!

Very logical. I even have seed to a variety of hops already, altho may not be appropriate for this use...
DANK is what we're after here...

VERY much appreciate your info!