Labelling Day

Today it's just too hot to make anything in the Skinflint Workshop. Instead, I'm catching up on some labelling in the air conditioning at home.

Yesterday, 5kg of Pure Moisture Shampoo was bottled, so needed labelling. Pure Lemongrass Soap had to be planed and labelled and Blackberry Sage Soap needed the same.

You'll notice that the 250ml Pure Moisture Shampoo is in the squat shaped bottles as my supplier is out of the tall ones. The label takes up most of the bottle!

Pure Lemongrass Soap

Skinflint Handmade Pure Lemongrass Soap is now ready for sale!

The bars look great with the ochre coloured swirl in a lemon background. Lemongrass is an astringent and has natural antimicrobial and anti-fungal properties.

Formulated with coconut, grapeseed and castor oils, Pure Lemongrass soap has kaolin clay added for it's cleansing properties. Kaolin is a drawing agent, so is excellent for those with oily skin or skin which is acne prone.

I've used Lemongrass Essential oil and added Lemongrass Fragrance oil to enhance the scent and to ground the essential oil which does have a tendency to dissipate over time otherwise.

Spiced Hot Chocolate

Sounds like something you'd have on a cold winter's day, but it's actually an experimental soap! It's in the freezer right now and if it turns out the way I'm hoping, it will not only smell delicious it will look fantastic!

Warm and chocolately with a creamy foam topped with cinnamon and scented with a blend of Brambleberry Spiced Italian Chocolate and a touch of Vanilla. I won't know what it's going to turn out like until the vanilla in the fragrances do their trick and turn the base chocolate brown. I'm just hoping that the top stays delicously creamy white.

Here it is out of the mould. It's not yellow, it's creamy coloured:

Day 2:

 Getting darker...

Day 7:

A little bit darker...

Day 14:

Beginning to look chocolatey...

As you can see I cut it a little too early in my eagerness to see what it looked like. It was still very soft and the white has dragged down.

I think next time I'll add some cocoa or Crio Bru to the base to help with the colour as well as the fragrance.

Pure Lemongrass Soap

The latest in the Skinflint Handmade Soap line up is Pure Lemongrass. It's a very pretty lemon coloured soap with delicate green swirls (now changed to a sort of khaki colour) throughout.

Scented, of course, with Lemongrass, it contains kaolin clay which is excellent for oily skin. Lemongrass essential oil is also anti-bacterial, making this soap perfect for teenage skin and for those who suffer from acne.

Made with coconut oil, grapeseed oil and shea butter, it's mild and conditioning, without being too cleansing. This batch of soap is still in the freezer, but when it's out and ready to cure, I'll post a photo.

Ready for use on February 11th.

New Fragrance Lines

With Christmas just around the corner, the Skinflint Workshop has been a busy place these last few weeks.

The beautiful looking and smelling Tayberry & Teakwood Soap is now a permanent line in the product range. It has proved so popular and has sold out completely within weeks.

A new batch is curing in the Skinflint workshop right now and it will be ready to use on the 16th January. I will label and have it ready for sale before Christmas. A little note will come with it to indicate the curing time it needs.

Two new Soy Melt fragrances are available. The luscious Very Vanilla and the breezy Sea Moss are great new additions to the Home Fragrance range. Along with these, there's the cute little Soy Candles available in four fragrances - Bananarama, Mimosa Breeze, Dragon's Blood and Fresh Cut Roses. At only $9.00, they make a great small gift or addition to a gift basket.

The Container or the Product?

I make skin care products from my little workshop next to my house. I’m only small scale and my premise is to provide good plant based skin care products with all the extra goodies of the big brands, but at a reasonable price.

I do this by using basic packaging and basic labelling. My products are functional, not pretty. I don’t expect my customers to pay for packaging, glossy magazine advertising and movie star endorsement. They should be paying for the product itself.

I was not surprised then, to find a prospective wholesaler tell me that she loved my products, but she wouldn’t sell them in her salon because of the packaging. She said the hair products were lovely and all my creams were just beautiful. But, she just couldn’t bring herself to put a plain packaged product on her shelves.

She has expensive, exquisitely packaged and labeled skin care products on her shelves already and was looking for another line, and, bless her, she wanted something local.

In the time I’ve been making my products, I’ve spent a lot of time researching skin and hair care products and what goes into them. I spend hours looking at labels when I go shopping and am amazed at the amount of rubbishy ingredients in top label products. Clinique moisturisers, for example, contain mineral oil. While mineral oil isn’t harmful, it is a ‘nothing’ ingredient. It doesn’t penetrate the top layers of the skin or nourish in any way. It will actually prevent anything else in the product from penetrating, making the product useless.

Worst of all, it is dirt cheap. Yet, Clinique market their Dramatically Different Moisturising Lotion for $74 for 125ml.

At the very high end, we have L’Occitane Immortelle Divine Cream at $140 for a mere 50ml. Containing nothing more than water, plant oils, waxes, vitamin E and A, in my mind, this is an abomination! The jar is absolutely beautiful, a collector’s item, but really, is that what you want to buy – a beautiful jar? Even worse is the variety of preservatives in this product, not one, but a whack of them, including Phenoxyethanol, Methylparaben, Ethylparaben, Butylparaben, Isobutylparaben, Propylparaben & Tetrasodium EDTA.

Then there’s the organic, pure and natural skin care ranges with nothing artificial, no ‘chemicals’, nothing man made. Packaged in expensive containers in lovely little boxes, these products have little more than water (pure spring water, of course), plant oils and emulsifiers in them. Yet, a product like Burt’s Bees Moisturising Day Crème costs $30 for just 57g.  The ingredients of this product are basically, water, oils, beeswax and borax (the emulsifier), thickeners and anti oxidants to prevent the oils going rancid. 

Do people really want a product because it’s in a beautiful double walled glass jar with a metallic gold lid? Does this make them feel the product inside must be so much better than anything in a plastic flip top tube?

If you’re interested in value for money, please be discriminatory and read the labels on your skin care products. Don’t pay for advertising, packaging and endorsements. Look for the products with the basic packaging, little advertising and great ingredients.

Soy Candles

The latest "The Skinny" can be found on the Skinflint Website.  There's information on different ways to use some of the products, the latest online special and the lowdown on Enriching Face Lotion.

The Skinflint Workshop is back in action with lots of products being manufactured. Some will be packaged differently until stocks of new containers arrive. Since the regular labels may not fit on the different container, the labelling may also look different. Hopefully by January, all will be rectified!

Dragon's Blood Soy Candle

I've been making some gorgeously fragrant soy candles in these cute little Baby Metro Jars. They will be available for sale soon at only $10.00 $9.00 each. Fragrances will be listed on the website as they become available. The apple gives you an idea of the size of these cute candles.

Soy wax burns cleanly and leaves no residue unlike paraffin wax. Most candles purchased from shops (such as Dusk) are made from paraffin wax since it is harder and less likely to become damaged in transit. When the flame is extinguished, the smoke is black. If the candle is in a container, the glass becomes black after time. Soy wax doesn't do this, making it the choice for the candles from Skinflint. It is far more environmentally friendly and is easily cleaned up with soap and water.

Soy Candles make a great small gift for teachers and work colleagues and are an ideal item to include in a gift basket. I expect these candles to be snapped up, so get your orders in quickly!

Fragrances so far are:

•  Mimosa Breeze - A very complex, exotic and soft feminine-floral scent with hints of warm jasmine, rosewood, musk and cedarwood.
• Fresh Cut Roses - the ultimate Rose fragrance, just like a whole lot of freshly picked rose petals.
• Bananarama - a fruity combination of tropical banana, pineapple and grapefruit with the tiniest hint of coconut.
• Dragon's Blood - warm, woody and earthy scent, with notes of amber, vanilla, sandalwood, patchouli & light tones of powdery musks and hints of asian florals to bring out subtle spice undertones.