Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

Because I’ve seen plastic toys that have a scent, I know that it must be technically possible to make scented plastic, or perhaps to “paint” plastic with a smell. I have done a few experiments pouring essential oils in increasing quantities into my plastics as I’m mixing/curing them, but so far I have had no real success. The plastic cures fine, so it’s good to know that the oils do not have a negative chemical effect, but the plastic completely encapsulates the odor. If I sand the plastic it releases scent in the dust, but not in normal use. To do these tests in a way that’s not totally wasteful, I used them as an excuse to make “thumb tacks” — I made some quick molds of my thumb and little finger by squishing some fast-setting silicone putty around them and then mounted either a tack or a magnet (you can see that in the little finger one) that’s strong enough to make it a fridge magnet that can hold up documents. In the picture below, the top-right thumb is cast in a translucent plastic that almost looks like sand-blasted glass, and the bottom left one was an experiment to see what would happen if I mixed a scoop of raspberry seeds into the plastic base (an experiment that I consider completely successful). Oh, and click to zoom in.