Lemon Meringue Soap

I used a new fragrance oil for this one and while it smells luscious, I think I still prefer the lemon/litsea/peppermint/yuzu blend that I used for the hot process soaps earlier. This fragrance oil (Lemon Meringue Pie from Nature's Garden) is lemony but also sugary, whereas the e.o./f.o. blend I used in the hot process soap was more citrusy and lemon, with a light sweet note from the peppermint. The unfortunate thing about the e.o./f.o. blend is that it seemed to disappear quite quickly in soap, as citrus essential oils tend to do. The nice thing about this fragrance oil was that it didn't accelerate the soap at all, I had lots of time to split the batch into 3 colors and swirl. I added some vanilla stabilizer to the fragrance oil, because I wanted to try to keep it from discoloring. I also used titanium dioxide but would skip that next time as it caused some crackles in the soap.

I was going to try using some lemon juice in this soap but decided not to; I thought dealing with two unknown factors (never having used this f.o. before or lemon juice in soap) might be pushing my luck! Next time I might try freezing a little bit of lemon juice in coconut milk and replacing some of the water with it. Definitely don't want to use too much lemon juice, because it will neutralize the lye and the resulting soap would be way too soft and superfatted.

The lemons pieces on top are MP, I made them by pouring the colors in 2 different sizes of round cookie cutters and then hand-forming them while they were still soft. The veins on the lemons were made inadvertently, because the cookie cutters were on plastic wrap when I poured the soap :)