Trish
- 2 min read

I'm back and getting my salt & hibiscus on

It's wonderful to travel but always so good to be home again and in my case, back to making soap. As I was away for the last two months I totally missed putting the Valentine's Day soaps I had made up on my online store, oh well, more for the upcoming sale.

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY to everyone.

While I didn't get the chance to make soap while I was over in Senegal, I did buy some ingredients to use for our "Senegal Collection".

The first soap in this collection includes, as one of its ingredients, Hibiscus Oil, which I bought at a local market in Dakar. The hibiscus flowers are magnificent over there. The oil is made by cold pressing the seeds and has no perfume or aroma at all.

Hibiscus juice, called Bissap, is Senegal's national drink. The juice is a gorgeous dark pink. I tried it a couple of times but they put a lot of sugar in it so it was a bit too sweet for my taste.

A glass of hibiscus juice, called Bissap in Senegal

Click on the pic below for an article on how hibiscus farming is empowering women in Senegal.

Another local Senegalese ingredient I used is salt from Lac Rose, the pink lake.

You can click on the pic below of piles of salt curing to read about my visit to the pink lake of Senegal, which the locals call 'Lac Rose'.

Piles of salt curing on the shoreside of the pink lake

I'm calling this limited edition soap, the 'Lac Rose Salt & Hibiscus Bar' - it's curing as we speak. It has to be a limited edition as I could only bring back so much on an international flight. This is a batch of twelve bars, two for me as testers and ten for sale. They need six weeks to cure properly, so the release date will be March 28, but will be available for pre-order as well in a few days.