Gen 2 Development - Bars 4 and 5

Bar 4:

II've been working on a vanilla-chai blend for a vtuber.  I approached her with my own initial idea, which was the chai spice with what I knew to be her second-favorite fruit.  Her first favorite was banana, and I've never experienced a banana scent/flavor that didn't suck.  Anyhow, she countered with vanilla:  Easy, right?

...yeah, no.  So dig this:  My initial go-to supplier for fragrances had four different scents that I would think of as "just vanilla."  Naturally I had to get sample bottles of all four to figure out what was different about them.  And yes, they all smell subtly different, and no, I don't know how to explain the differences any more than they could!

Also, their chai spice blend was just okay, but my feeling is that its a little too strong on the black pepper.  Fortunately, I have clove fragrance oil from elsewhere, so I was able to rebalance their blend to my liking.

I mentioned the balancing act between cherry blossom and sage in one of my previous statues:  Its an issue where one scent will blast the other scent out of existence.  There's a similar issue going on with vanilla and chai, though not as extreme.  If I do a 50-50 mix, the end result smells like chai, but you can't really pick out the vanilla.  But if you remove the vanilla, you'll notice its absence.

Have you ever watch Bob Ross?  Go check him out, his show streams 24/7 on his channel on youtube.  He used a "wet-on-wet" technique.  What he'd do is take the blank canvas and blast the whole thing with a layer of white paint, and then he'd establish a horizon line, usually with blue paint, and then he'd kinda drag the blue upwards and blend the colors in to make a sky.  You don't see the white painted canvas in a finished Bob Ross painting, but you'd surely notice if he didn't have it there.

I bring this up because there are scent equivalents to that white canvas - scents that are kinda broad background scents.  Vanilla is one of those.  You can blend all sorts of things into it, and you don't notice it anymore, but if it were gone, it'd throw off everything.

I decided not to Bob Ross this one.  I wanted you to KNOW this was vanilla, I wanted it to be more distinctive.  So, this soap is very vanilla-forward with the chai spices as a nice accent.  I think its pretty good. 

I thought I was done.  Then last night, I'm lying in bed, and a thought hits me:  Goat's milk.  I have made soap with that before, though nothing in Gen 1 is using it. It changes the consistency of the soap a bit due to its fat content, but its main effect is to bring sugar to the party, which increases lather.  We can make this a proper vanilla chai latte!  So I've emailed the vtuber involved to see if she'd be okay with that:  Obviously this would not be vegan-friendly.

So, if she's into it, I'll need a few more days on this one.

Bar 5:

This vtuber was a bit of a challenge:  While I do subscribe to her, I've never really gotten any scent impressions or ideas from her, so I directly asked what she was into.  Yellow flowers and anything sweet, she said.

I did offer to allow her to adopt the existing Gen 1 scent, OIIApple, which I thought might fit the bill, but she wanted to see what else I could come up with.

So what yellow flowers are out there other than honeysuckle?  Jasmine, but that's usually more white than yellow.  Sunflowers - but sunflowers don't smell nice, they're more pretty to look at.  I was now in unknown territory, so I had to do some research, and then some ordering.  I hit onto ylang-ylang.

What does ylang-ylang smell like?  Its hard to describe.  Its floral, but its also kinda fruity.  Its pretty good.  Its a flower that I, as an older gentleman, would not mind smelling like.  Once I smelled it, my thought was to pair it with ginger, which the vtuber agreed to.

The end result is pretty good!  I've added honey to the soap itself, in addition to some honey fragrance to boost the sweetness.  The ginger adds a touch of spice to the ylang-ylang's fruity floral aroma.  I'd be happy to use this one, and I hope she'll like it too.

Just in case, though, to hedge my bets:  I also got some champak fragrance oil.  That's a more flowery-smelling flower, for want of a better description.  Its nice, but perhaps a bit too feminine for my own tastes.  Still, I mixed up a prototype with the same ratios as the ylang-ylang version for consideration.  I think I would need to up the ginger ratio on the champak version though, if that's the one she prefers.