Quick Craft: DIY Foaming Hand Soap From Your Favorite Perfume!

Here comes a SUPER quick craft that's made me unreasonably happy this week. It's also a craft for a very specific circumstance: namely that there's a scent you love that ONLY comes in a perfume or body spray, and that you'd like to have as a hand soap.

Or maybe you just have the supplies around and want to make some pretty, awesome-smelling soap for cheap. That works, too.

Now, I've mentioned before that my one and only true perfumey love is the now discontinued (sob) Vanilla Lace body spray from Victoria's Secret.

(Side Note: if you have an old bottle that looks like this somewhere that still has some goodness in it and that you don't want anymore, please send it to meeeeee:)

I could swear these older bottles smell better/stronger, so now I pay $60 for a bottle that once cost $12.95, ha. This is the scent I wore on my first date with John and on our wedding day, though, not to mention the one I wear 80% of the time, so it's completely worth it to me.

SO, this craft in a nutshell: I made my own Vanilla Lace foaming hand soap!

 

 Isn't it pretty? The orange and gold reminds me of those old bottles. Ahh, good memories.

I didn't use my precious $60 stuff for this, though, because I also recently bought a much cheaper bottle, which looks like this:

This one's from the newer stock, so it only costs about $15 on Ebay. It's lighter and doesn't last as long as the original, but still smells lovely, so I wear it around the house.

I'd just gotten that bottle in the mail when I was about to throw out an empty soap bottle from Bath & Body works:

 

And I got an idea. 

(You see where this is going.)

Again, easy peasy: I grabbed some unscented soap I already had under the sink:

... and mixed it roughly 60/40 with water (more soap than water). I took off the old Bath & Body Works labels, scrubbed the bottle clean, and filled 'er up with my new soapy water mix. (The pump on those bottles is what makes the foam, so you can fill it with any watery soap.)

Next I added about 40 pumps of body spray and 2 drops of food coloring to the mix. The 40 pumps barely touched the amount in my perfume bottle; it still looks full. This gave me a nice light scent, but you may want to add more to make it stronger.

For the coloring I added one drop each of red and yellow, which gave me a gorgeous orange - just like the vintage Vanilla Lace bottles I love.

This was a color test with the gold vinyl. Aren't they pretty together?

The final touch was decorating the bottle. There are lots of fun options out there, but I decided to keep it simple:

I cut this gold vinyl with my Cricut, but if you don't have that option you could use stick-on letters from the scrapbooking aisle, or print your own label and "laminate" it with packing tape to make it waterproof.

Or skip the label entirely and fill the bottom of the bottle with glass marbles, little seashells, plastic Tsum-Tsum figures, or silk flowers, like these: 

 

 Via Homespun With Love

 Via Happy Wife, Happy 4 Life

I'm kind of loving the idea of hunting down old perfumes like Exclamation, Electric Youth, Love's Baby Soft, etc, and making soaps out of them. Too weird? Maybe that's too weird. I bet they'd be fun gifts, though! I mean, most of us probably don't want to wear the cheap perfumes from our teenage years, but a light hand soap of it could be a fun-and-cheesy way to get a blast of nostalgia.

Anyhoo, all that to say, I'm loving my new hand soap:

Now I get a light refresh of my body spray every time I wash my hands, and the foam is velvety soft.

Plus it matches my bathroom, which is even better.

I hope this sparks some good clean crafting for you, peeps! Now, tell me what old perfume you'd turn into a hand soap. Oh! And what kind of 90s era plastic charms you'd put in the bottle, because THAT'S a thing that has to happen. (Or maybe some jelly bracelets? ERMERGERSH, Yaaaassss.)

(It's good that I amuse myself over here, isn't it? ;p)

Happy crafting!

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