Castille in the Nude

In my college art history class (taken long ago) we learned my teacher's view on the difference between nude and naked. Yes, that's right, we had this sort of discussion in class, lol! Since then I have wholly adapted this view (to help sort art history out in my own head) and believe that nudists aren't actually nude, they are naked instead. This is because at one point in time or another, they had been clothed. With this thought in the back of my mind Botticelli's Venus in Birth of Venus is considered a nude painting because within her storyline she had never worn clothes before this point. Meanwhile, other paintings that may be called a "nude" painting, are actually "naked" paintings such as Titian's Danae series. Please be aware that the photos in the links are linked to these pictures which are NUDE and NAKED, so you may not want to click these while at work...

You must be asking yourself now, why in the heck am I talking about these things! Well, it's all for the good of one of the brand new soaps that I tried making this weekend. Plain old castille soap with nothing added to it. No fragrance, no colorant, no nothing. Just 100% virgin olive oil, water, and lye. It's my first naked soap... or so I thought... Since this is actually my very first Castille soap, as per my above explanation on naked vs. nude, this soap is technically a Nude soap ^_^ And hence the name "Castille in the Nude"

Now, before you go yawning on me and saying- oh, it's going to be boring soap, take a look and tell me if this is what you expected my plain castille to look like?



And the top may be a bit hard to see here...

Do you see the swirls?

And now I must answer THE question: How can this be a two-toned castille soap if absolutely nothing else was added to it?!

Well, the thing is that I actually made TWO batches of castille soap and swirled them together! In one batch I used the darkest colored olive oil I could get my hands on and the other batch was created with the lightest colored olive oil I could get my hands on! Wheee! *french accent* I am genius, no? *end french accent*

Actually, I'm sure I'm not the first to come up with this idea and it's far from perfect... I soaped at a 31% water/lye ratio so I could get to trace faster, but for some reason my soap got really hard and flaky and powdery on the outsides (top, sides, and bottom) but remained really soft on the inside. Plus, my swirl on the inside isn't as nice as I would like it to be... but on the whole I'm happy and can't stop smelling it! It has a nice lovely light olive oil/nutty scent to it. So, definitely one to try out again in the future!