Hello all...lotion bar-makin' noob here! I've been fiddling around with them for a week or so, I guess. I've toyed with the idea of making soap too, but crawl before you walk and all that, right? I've made my third batch of bars today. I started out with a recipe I found somewhere a few months ago while I was gathering information and they turned out decent. That batch was unrefined shea butter, macadamia nut oil, avocado oil and beeswax. I scented it with an EO mix of bergamot, lemon and cardamom. It was from the whole-foods type grocery store where I got the rest of the ingredients, just something I picked because I liked the way it smelled. So I said I'd never done this before, right? Right. I'd also never used any of the ingredients for anything else before, never handled any of them except beeswax either. I opened the shea butter and found out I do *NOT* like the smell of it. Ew. Oh well, I figured...I'll kill the smoky odor with the EO. So I melted everything according to the recipe and added the EO accordingly as well. The bars turned out well, but were a bit stickier than I liked. What I liked even less was the way they smelled. The smoky odor of the shea was still there, but now with a hint of lemon. Did I mention EW? Yeah. I re-melted it, added a little more wax and EO and they came out better consistency-wise and with a stronger smell of lemon but no more smoky shea. Not what I was expecting, but OK. They're usable. I thought the shea butter was the cause of the weird scent so I decided to try different ingredients in the next batch. I got some olive butter, candelilla wax and rosewood EO. My second batch was candelilla, olive and avocado. I didn't scent this batch so it has the sort of leafy, earthy smell of the wax and although I'm not wild about it I can deal with it. The third batch was beeswax, olive butter, avocado and macadamia nut oils. I scented it with the rosewood EO. And what do they smell like? LEMON! I don't understand how! I did use the same molds, which were thoroughly cleaned right after the first batch and I couldn't smell anything on them when I washed them then. They are plastic, and they sat unused for a few days before I used them today. (I used different molds for the second, unscented batch.) Every batch was melted in a stainless steel double boiler and since batch 2 didn't have even a tiny whiff of batch 1 in it before being poured I assumed I scrubbed everything well enough after each use. Is the lemon smell coming from the plastic molds anyway? Is it the beeswax making everything smell like the first batch? Some other common ingredient? Am I doing something else wrong? Am I crazy? (Wait...don't answer that last one!) Any suggestions for other really odorless ingredients I might use so I can make other bars that smell like something besides lemon? ***I'd like to give the user Kitn a Special Hello! Sorry I couldn't just PM you! Your username caught my eye because Kit N. is the name of a really sweet kitty I lost last February at 10 years old, so Kitn, meet MY Kit N.! Thanks everyone!