New Green Facial Bar

If you've been to my Etsy shop lately, you might have noticed quite a few new products.  Right now though, I'm only going to talk about the new Green Facial Bar.  I absolutely love this one.

So, you're probably wondering "why is it called green if it's brown?".  That can be explained by the ingredients.  This bar was made with Green Tea and French Green Clay.  Hence, the "green".  Since I used actual, brewed green tea instead of green tea powder, this turned the soap a brown color. 

I thought that adding the French green clay would make it a little greener, but that's ok.  The benefits are all I'm interested in on this one.  As with most clays, French green clay is great for pulling toxins from the skin, as well as gently exfoliating. 

Green tea is full of antioxidants which are great for your skin.  There are other supposed benefits as well, but with soap being a wash-off product, and my products not being evaluated by the FDA for drug claims, I'll let you do your own research on that.

Tea tree and peppermint essential oils have also been added.  Tea tree for its benefits, and peppermint (being completely honest here) mostly just because I'm not a huge fan of the tea tree scent, though it does have its own benefits as well.

As you can see, this bar was designed purely for purpose.  No fancy colors or "fun" fragrances but it's chock full of healthy ingredients.  If you decide to try it out, be sure to let me know what you think!

Throwback Thursday - How It All Began

For Throwback Thursday, how about a story about how I started my business?

I actually had no intentions of starting a business at all!  Every year I make a little something to add to everybody's Christmas gifts.  I had always wanted to make soap but never got around to doing it.  One day back in 2006, I was browsing Craigslist (I used to be obsessed with that site) and I came across somebody giving away all their soaping supplies.  Giving away.  For free.  Needless to say, I called them up right away.  Turns out they were moving and didn't want to take everything with them.  Why they didn't want to sell it is beyond me, now that I know how much that stuff was worth.  And I'm kicking myself for getting rid of some of the molds.  At the time they were way to big for me so I passed them along to other soapmakers. 

Well, that was my motivation to start on the Christmas projects.  Since I had never made soap before I decided to do melt and pour.  (The kind where you buy a base, melt it down to add your scent and color, and then pour it into molds)  Everybody loved it and kept trying to convince me to sell it!  I had tons of fun making it but I really wanted to be able to control the ingredients so I took a course on cold process soapmaking (making soap from scratch).  I did start selling the melt and pour soap at craft shows and Etsy while I was learning to make it from scratch. 

Some of my Christmas gift soaps:

Strawberry and Cream soap rolls.  One of the very first soaps in my Etsy shop. (And yes, this is the actual picture I used.  What was I thinking??)

After that I was hooked, and started learning to make more things like lip balms, body butters, and perfumes.  Before long, I was running a business! 

And here's one of my current soap pictures for a quick comparison.  What a difference!