Finished my test skein and series 4 of GPTD (it was delightful, I cried), took some photos with the new camera between rain showers, caught up on The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.

I also made a larger batch of bath bombs yesterday. I’m pleased with these; I’ve dialed in the dry ingredient mix such that they fizz for about five minutes and they float. These use Lake colorants instead of dyes, I think I prefer them. I’ll keep playing until my supplies run out, but I suspect it’s the lakes I’ll buy when it’s time to replenish. Favorite scent so far is “raspberry ale” which is very much the smell of Framboise Lambic.

making bath bombs continues to be the current craft obsession. my cosmetic dyes & lakes have arrived and the first attempt at color is drying now.

today i ordered more citric acid, polysorbate 80, and fragrance oil samples. i also got some knockoff labware pipettes and microscoops.

things i've learned:

• my taste in fragrance samples is so...me. (it's all aspirational/firing in the dark since i can only go on descriptions.) like i read the names off and C laughed. look, if they actually get anywhere near "bonfire" or "cinnamon roll" i'm going to be extremely happy.

• Edmonds Scientific has gone out of business. i loved that catalog so much when i was a kid and i thought they would always be around.

• i looked at buying real borosilicate pipettes from Fisher and was not prepared to spend a few hundred dollars on a case of 12. so i'll deal with some cheap glass knockoffs, it's not like i'm making medications - it hurts me how inexpensive and convenient it would be to get one-time plastic ones with integrated bulbs to throw away.

• of the three libraries i have access to, the one with the DIY bath books is the one that includes Island County. coincidence? i think not. also, all three of the books i got out turned out to be slim, free of any reference to chemistry or safety, and heavy on the girl power and/or crappy woo. ("sisterpreneurs" shudder, "baths" for each star sign that - if you read more than one - used the same recipe repeatedly.)

• it feels like the people who talk about bath bombs on the internet are all white women with everything that comes with that (see book cringe above). it turns out that using mooncake press molds to shape bath bombs is a thing. and hey, they're gorgeous and look like fun to use. but i feel like it smacks of cultural appropriation and somehow that conversation doesn't seem to have happened (or at least it didn't blow up enough for google to index it). i have fond memories of mooncakes shared by co-workers over the years during the Mid-Autumn Festival. i've been thinking about it on and off all afternoon; i think mostly it bothers me that white people are selling them and seem oblivious to what the press was made for.

i used to have a reasonably-sized set of Wilton gel colors that i used for dying yarn/fiber (and occasionally food). not that i can find them now. C thinks that i might have purged them at one point since we do live across the street from JoAnn's.

this is to say that i was plotting the next batch of bath bombs and thought i might try adding some color, and surely gel food color would be an appropriate choice since it wouldn't add water to the mixture? i did a little research and it turns out that it's better that i didn't find them - dye for uses where it may contact your delicate bits must pass more stringent safety testing than dye you can eat. ("lip safe" is chemically less irritating than "food safe".) technically i can make food-colored ones for myself, but i shouldn't give them away and it's illegal to sell them. since i'm sensitive to a random assortment of chemicals i probably shouldn't chance it.

so now there's a sampler of two different types of lip safe cosmetic colorants coming my way.