Colorants and fragrances help soap makers craft unique products that match their branding and customers’ preferences. At Bulk Apothecary, we carry soap making supplies like fragrance oils, colorant bars, and pigment powders. Here are four tips for pairing colors and scents in your soap products:
1. Pair Warm Ingredients
Try pairing warm colors with warm fragrances to create soaps with similar visual and scent characteristics. Soap making supplies like colorant bars and powders in shades of red, orange, and brown work well with warm, spiced fragrances like amber, cinnamon, vanilla, and tobacco. Bay rum and other earthy, spicy scents work well with deep browns and golds. Keeping the pigment and scent profiles similar makes your products more cohesive and helps customers use visual cues to identify specific products. Adding
2. Combine Cool Elements
Cool-toned soap colorants and fresh fragrances pair well together to create light, refreshing products. Fragrances like mountain rain and lavender work well with pigments like cool blues and purples. Light greens and yellows pair well with bright, fresh scents like cucumber mint, coconut lime, green apple, and other citruses. Adding dried botanicals, like peppermint leaves and lavender flowers, that have coordinating colors and fragrances increases your soap bars’ visual and olfactory impacts. Incorporating dried botanicals also allows you to add decorative elements and exfoliating characteristics to your soap bars. Bulk Apothecary carries a range of dried flowers, plants, spices, and other botanicals. We also offer soap additives like seeds and other ingredients.
3. Use Seasonal Inspiration
Creating seasonal and themed soaps allows you to experiment with color and fragrance combinations based on holidays and changes in the weather. For spring-themed soaps, look for light or pastel colorants in shades of pink, purple, yellow, and green. These colors represent the growth and new life of spring, and they can be paired with fresh floral fragrances. Some fragrance oils to add to spring soaps include gardenia, rose, honeysuckle, and chamomile. These gentle floral fragrances complement the lighter colorants to create an airy, seasonal soap.
Summer soaps may incorporate more vibrant colors and fruity, tropical scents. These elements capture the warm, bright nature of summer weather and outdoor activities. Some fragrance oils to use in summer-themed soaps include Bulk Apothecary’s Mango Madness, Pineapple Slices, Watermelon, and Tahiti Sweetie. These fragrances add bold, sweet notes to summer soaps. Fall-inspired soaps can be made with darker, warmer pigments like red, brown, black, and gold. These soaps can incorporate scents like pumpkin, cinnamon, and apple to capture the fragrances of the harvest season.
Winter soaps can be crafted to match the cold season or the warm holidays. If you are using snowy mountain weather as inspiration, look for color bars or powders in light blue, deep green, or pearly white hues. Scents that pair well with these colors include woody pine and peppermint. Warmer holiday scents, like cinnamon, cloves, orange, and vanilla, work well with bright reds, creamy whites, and deep browns. Bulk Apothecary carries winter holiday and Christmas-themed fragrance oils like Fireplace Embers, Candy Cane, Merry Mistletoe, and Xmas Memory.
4. Match Natural Palettes
If you want to craft a soap around a bold, plant-based fragrance, like green apple or pumpkin pie, look for colorants that match the natural hues of the main ingredients. This creates a candle with cohesive style and function. If you prefer woody, earthy scents, pair them with brown, green, and black colors to make the rich scents more impactful. Fresh, cleansing scents, like clean linen and mountain air, work well with light tones of blues, greens, purples, and whites. If you have a pigment you want to try but are unsure which fragrances will work well with it, explore fruits, greenery, spices, and flowers that have similar colors and evoke scents that match the color’s intensity.
Find High-Quality Soap Making Supplies
Bulk Apothecary offers a range of soap making supplies to support your hobby or business. We carry melt-and-pour soap bases, liquid soap bases, molds, packaging materials, and a variety of additives. Crafting soaps with carefully paired colors, fragrances, and additives helps you create products that are unique to your brand and meet your customers’ skincare needs. Explore our apothecary items today to find colorants and fragrance oils for your next batch of soap.
