When you have a whole load of ideas for new things you’d love to make, you find out pretty soon whether your ideas are going to be a hard road to get right. You often find out much, much later whether you can even make them work at all. Here’s the lab notes, fresh from the bench, for our top five Fill Refill flagrant fragrance failures… Easy for you to say!
‘BAR’ SOAP
The leftover barley and hops mix from brewing beer is almost too plentiful to get used. It has tons of uses when it’s fresh, and a real nice warm & kinda oaty fragrance. Biological for sure, but nice. We took some sample solids from our pals at Maule Brewing Co. in Northampton and mixed them up into a ‘bar’ soap as an exfoliant, making our own soap direct from locally sourced Farrington’s Mellow Yellow rapeseed oil. We set all our tests into bars and waited patiently for the cold process to complete over the next few weeks.
We’d tried all sorts to deactivate the yeast, first, but no dice. The insides of the barley were too hard to access, so the yeast always made a comeback, or at best the barley seeped a brown stain into the soap that didn’t look, feel or smell the way we wanted! Back to the drawing board…
ORANGE ‘EASY’ PEEL EXTRACT
Another waste product we all know about is orange peels, left over from the juicing of… oranges! Plenty of folks had been offering us peels and so we figured we could extract oil from the best of the zest by steam distillation and use it to make a limited-run of refreshing, uplifting and clean smelling orange water hydrolat, whenever we had peels on hand! Easy, right?
No. As it turned out, if you leave any juice on the skins or get any kind of pulp in there, you get the acrid smell of barbecued orange that never really goes away. The oil was great, though! Sweet-smelling, refreshing and vibrant, but not exactly plentiful. Worse is the smell of rotting orange you get if you leave them out for just an hour too long on a busy day. Acetone tones! As we didn’t want to use any volatile organic compounds like alcohol to extract the oil more quickly and selectively, this one got shelved. Bitter luck next time!
EAU DE THISTLE
We reached out to our pals at our local Wildlife Trust to see if there was any hope of turning local plant waste (they’re often knocking back scrubland to allow precious grasses to grow through) into something the Wildlife Trust could sell (and reap the proceeds to help with their conservation work). There were a few curious options: hazel, willow, reeds, bullrushes… and among them, creeping thistle!
Thistle has some lovely purple flowers and grows fast. As it’s not known to be poisonous, we took in some sacks full of them at the end of the day and tried a steam distillation to see what would come over. The results varied based on the method and how long the thistles had to sit before they could be processed. Turns out they turn brown really fast, and any wilting turns your hydrolat into cabbage water. A lot of them went in the compost, but the freshest of them all gave what we can only describe as an unexpected, rose-like scent. Not exactly like roses, a bit more astringent and almost tea-like, but definitely pleasant (and plentiful when done right). While we know that this will be a hit if and when we can get it right, we’re struggling to make it consistently, so it looks like Eau de Thistle sits on this list as another Fail Refill, temporarily!
BRITISH LEYLANDII
We’ve got leylandii out front here in Fillville that get trimmed more or less every year, generating quite a bit of waste. Looking out the window, we loved the idea of using materials that come from as close to us as possible. This one doesn’t come any closer! Leylandii are fragrant conifers, so we put some green fronds in a blender, steam-distilled the smoothie that came out and… well… we didn’t need to sniff the results. The whole lab was filled with a verdant citrussy evergreen smell! What’s more, the cut branches aren’t very sensitive to being left without attention for a while, so we don’t have the same rotten problem as thistle.
So, what’s the issue? There almost isn’t one! Firstly, we don’t know for sure whether leylandii essential oil and hydrolat is okay for skin, for example, but it’s certainly been okay on ours. Secondly, the smell itself does lean into a natural, coniferous mustiness over time and it’s less potent in a product than you’d hope. As that freshness doesn’t last forever, it’s hard to say whether anyone would really love it in the long term. We certainly do though, so maybe we should make it for ourselves this year and see where that gets us. Keep an eye on this one.
THE TRIALS OF PELLICLES
We dig kombucha. One time, a few jars of home-brewed kombucha got brought into the lab along with the symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast (pellicle) used to make it, in the hopes that we could do something cool with it, anything, that would yield a useful product for the home. Our target of choice was a soap, but in the end it didn’t make it to further testing.
It turns out that neither kombucha nor pellicles are especially nice in soap, and don’t make anything cool or useful in combination with anything used for cleaning. They certainly don’t seem to make anything cleaner just using them by themselves. The pellicle we had was home-grown and does make excellent kombucha but not so great for cleaning. Or touching. Or keeping down breakfast.
We did try drying out the scoby to make powder or turning it into a paste, but to no avail. It just didn’t seem to want to be anything but the lumpy, flesh-like mass that it is.
By Dr Andrew Duckworth
Wondering what products we do have that made the cut and smell real good?
Check out our refillable Hand Soap (Fig Leaf) – a cult classic on the coolest counters in the country. IYKYK.
Check out the essential oil blend we put together to make Bath Soak (Forest) – feels like taking a bath, outside, in a forest, at night…
Check the guide we made on how to use and where to keep ROSE WATER HYDROLAT. (in the fridge).
