s

SmellyBlog

Alberta Home Magazine & WestCoast Families


And while I'm talking publicity, I haven't had a chance to mention that the March issue of WestCoast Families featured my body products (Song of Songs body oil and Guilt sugar scrub); and the spring issue of Alberta Home magazine featured our White Potion candle.

Sugar, Oil, Salt...


Using pure and simple ingredients for making nourishing and uncompromising bath and body products. To avoid the whole notion of needing to use powerful synthetic preservative and emulsifiers, I've avoided using any water altogether in these products.

Instead, using light-weight yet moisturizing natural oils such as jojoba, virgin coconut, avocado, tea seed, rice bran and shea oils, I've concocted a simple line of body and bath products that I love using and wanted to share with you. Fractionated coconut oil helps to improve these nourishing oil and create an oil base that is fast absorbing and that leaves the skin silky and moisturized for more than a day, yet without clogging pores or feeling greasy at all.


Anointing oils, highly fragrant and act like a perfume for the entire body, leaving it moisturized and nourished but non greasy. I'm really excited about sharing these oils with you, I've been experimenting with a few types of oil bases (mixtures of various nourishing oils, along with the fractionated coconut oil to give it a non-greasy finish that is the natural equivalent of a "dry oil". Not all perfumes are suitable for body products. I chose the ones that incorporate beneficial oils to the skin. My personal favourite so far is Song of Songs, which stays on the skin the longest (24 hours later, when I bathe again, the warm water releases the scent yet again from my pores!). White Potion is more delicate and releases the scent better on the skin than from the bottle. The salycilates in the tuberose tend to get camouflaged in the oil bases and remain dormant. They won't wake up until they hit a warm living skin... The Tamya tropical oil is really fun. I am hoping to package it in a spray bottle rather than a pour-bottle. It really feels like a "dry oil" and the scent is very light and refreshing. Megumi is the newest addition. I created a vetiver base first (there was a gentlemen who kept requesting a vetiver body oil), and I felt it really needed a little extra something, which is the jasmine as in Megumi. The spiciness is due to the addition of ginger and cardamom, which are less irritating to the skin than the allspice in the perfume formula. It's a very warm, woody and sensual scent with a light jasmine tough that makes it feel more perfumey.


Sugar scrubs are my favourite way to exfoliate. A good sugar scrub should be easy to work on the skin and my personal preference is for scrubs that exfoliate as well as moisturize and nourish the skin. It saves that step of applying a moisturizer after bathing, which to me is a huge bonus as it saves time! Most of the sugar scrubs I like are quite messy in the bath tub, which although requires more frequent cleaning of your tub (which is never a bad idea), is a lot of fun in the process. Scrubs that in addition to the sugar have exfoliants such as ground nutshells or coffee beans are among my favourites... the sugar itself dissolves in the water. The ground nuts and shells should be large enough to not stubbornly stick to the surface of the tub.

I made my sugar scrubs with both white and brown sugar, and added exfoliants such as cacao nibs and ground coffee, in a carrier of vegetable glycerin and nourishing oils. after using them you don't need a moisturizer, and the skin is left exfoliated, soft and non greasy.


Bath salts, a pure way to unwind and cleanse the body from toxins. Although these are not by any means new products (I launched them on Mother's day 2009) - I just created a larger size packaging for my bath salts, and will change the collection a bit. The Lavender, Licorice & Vanilla bath salts are a very slow seller so I will likely discontinue them and will replace them with a Vetiver scented bath salts. I found some really neat bath salts that I'm excited to use - Ancient Canadian Sea Salt from Manitoba!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Good Enough to Eat

I'm often asked, if and when or why don't I have my own line of scented body products. My answer to this 3-part question is that I would love to create an original line of my very own beautifully scented natural body care. Which means, I would like to have my very own formulations rather than take some existing bases and add a scent to them. This is not advisable from technical point of view, not to mention marketing wise: each scent has a different chemical make up, therefore it is hard to predict how it will interact with a given base or the other. Often times, when a fragrance is added to, say, an existing unscented body lotion "base" - the lotion simply breaks down. Not a pretty site, but also not something you would want to put on your skin.

There are many technical difficulties, challenges and problems when developing a new skin care line: the texture, fragrance and performance of the product (i.e.: how does it make your skin feel after), not to mention packaging. Unlike my existing products, which I assume most of my customers use when their hands are clean and fairly dry - one could not expect such handling of a body products that will be most likely stored and used in the bathroom - or even the bathtub or shower! I won't bore you with the details of what it takes to develop the line from start to finish, but I will let you in on some of my recent experiments of very simple body care products that are all natural, free of preservatives, that will make your skin feel good and smell fantastic.

I've already begun my adventure with the bath salts for Mother's Day which require a very simple procedure of blending essential oils with a salt-mix. The next step for me was to figure out a formula for a sugar scrub that will be as fun to use as some of my favourite body products. I love sugar scrubs, and especially the more luxurious ones, because they do two tasks at once: the exfoliate my skin while leaving it gently moisturized. A good sugar scrub, in my opinion, needn't be followed by a body lotion or a cream. It should be the kind that will emulsify with the bathing water and leave the skin soft and smooth...

A while back, I created a body-butter consistency sugar scrub. The challenge with that was that it left the skin a little too greasy, plus the butters and some of the oils (i.e.: coconut oil) harden too much in cooler weather. So my task today was to make a sugar scrub that will look pretty much the same in most room temperature ranges.

My first trial was one based on Guilt perfume, which I've been meaning to make for a loooong time. The concept was to use ground up cacao nibs as an additional exfolliant besides the sugar. Although I was tempted to use cacao butter, I decided to opt for something more stable: shea oil, which is liquid rather than solid in room temperature. Along with vegetable glycerine, fractionated coconut oil and vitamin E it's bound to leave behind a silky-smooth skin. The ground cacao nibs add a nice texture and an earthy, irresistible yummy chocolate smell, which I only enforced with very little bit of cacao and vanilla absolute. It also has sweet orange and wild orange oils, and of course - orange flower absolute. Using the scrub in the bath was a real treat: it's like playing with mud but not really getting dirty beacuse it is so easy to wash off (it would have been a totally different story if I put cacao powder instead of the nibs!). And it makes the skin look all dark and tan or for the duration of the scrubbing ceremony, which I thoroughly enjoy myself. Yet the nicest surprise was that the orange blossom lingered on the skin for about an hour after bathing!

Back to the top