Adam + Eve - New Design

In keeping with the restocking/redesign theme we started with Peony Sorbet, I had to do a remake of our Adam + Eve Pure Silk Soap.  This is, again, one of our top sellers because the scent is just so lovely and the black and white design is always a classic favourite.  However, there's classic and there's oh I've seen that a hundred times before and I wanted this classic to be a WOW classic, if you see what I mean.

The soap is made with Sweet Almond & Golden Olive Oils with lashings of creamy Cocoa Butter but not just that, it also has Aloe Vera, Buttermilk, Goatsmilk & Coconut Milk along with White Clay and Colloidal Oatmeal.  It's fragranced with Vanilla Anise - this fragrance is described as blending the incredible fragrance of Madagascan Orchid Vanilla with the spicy accent of anise and the warmth of vetiver, amber and clove, creates an unexpected, modern story of vanilla.  It is truly a divinely deep scent and one loved by both men and women.

I coloured the black part of the soap using Midnight Black Clay & Activated Charcoal which are both extremely good for the skin in terms of cleansing and removing excess oils.

So, challenging myself to the hanger swirl again (and a great opportunity to see it done again if you're a little nervous about trying it), I remade Adam + Eve and you can see the Making Of video here:




And you can see the reveal when we do the Cutting video here:




Here are the stills photos taken, as always, by our favourite photographer, Titch Holland from http://www.facebook.com/takenbytitch (make sure to check out her page!).. hope you like them:

The soap will be fully cured by 20 August and should be on the site just shortly before then for ordering.  Hope you enjoy the photos and videos!!!

Lemon Provence - Pure Essential Soap

Here is the second of the new Pure Essential Soap collection - Lemon Provence.  This soap is made with Sweet Almond & Golden Olive Oils, Oat Milk, Manuka Honey, Kaolin Clay, Colloidal Oatmeal, Cocoa Butter & Pure Silk.  The colour comes from a little Tumeric which makes a lovely buttery yellow. 

I made my own Oatmilk for this ... I took 4 cups of distilled water and 1 cup of organic Irish oatflakes and they sat, soaking, all night.  The next day, I liquidised them together until they made a milk.  I was going to sieve the milk to remove the oats but they were so finely mixed in that I decided to use them in the soap.  It makes the soap very slightly exfoliating.  I also love the little flecks the oats leave in the soap.  The only thing I'd say about using full oatmilk for your soaps is that the lye doesn't mix in well with it - at my first mix, the lye clumped into very hard lumps so that had be carefully disposed of.  For this soap, I made a 50/50 lye solution with distilled water and then used the oatmilk for the additional liquid values.. that worked perfectly.

Manuka Honey is a well known skin loving ingredient with anti-bacterial properties, Kaolin Clay is perfect for all types of skin especially sensitive and dry skin types and colloidal oatmeal just adds to the goodness the organic oats brings to the party.

The soap is fragranced with our own essential oil blend of lemony May Chang & soothing French
Lavender with a drop of deep Cedarwood to create a citrusy, relaxing divine scent.

 It will be available for Pre-Order on http://www.iamhandmade.com/ourshop/prod_2027231-Lemon-Provence-PreOrder-Cure-Date-18-June.html. Many thanks to Titch Holland from www.facebook.com/takenbytitch for her video work.

Enough talk ... here are the photos! Hope you enjoy them!

 

 

Zingara - Pure Essential Soap

With our Pure Beer soap collection creating a LOT of interest, and due to the things I learnt from working with beer and other additives, I decided I wanted to work on another collection of soaps.. this one is called the Pure Essential Soap collection.

Pure Essential Soap is going to be a collection (number as yet undetermined) of 100% natural soaps, all with additives that are proven to perform for your skin, with natural colours and all fragranced with pure essential oils.  This was quite a challenge for me as, any regular reader will know that I LOVE my colours and I'm, what's known in the trade, as a complete FOHO (FO is short for fragrance oil and ho is... well, ya know).  To move to work only with natural colours and essential oil (or EO) blends was a bit of a leap for me ... but YAY to that! Again, if you're a regular reader, you'll know I love a good challenge! I need to always push myself to do something different, something new, something a little out of my comfort zone... otherwise things get a little samey, a little too easy.

So how did I go about planning the Pure Essential Soap collection? In the intial stages, I thought "what would I like to see for sale .. if I could make any soap but within the 100% natural boundary, what would I want".  That's always my own personal starting point.  Then, once I had a few thoughts under my belt, the iamhandmade.com team had a meeting ... well, ok.. me and Titch and Malky were driving down to Cork one day and we did some brainstorming in the car but hey, that's a meeting right? We threw around more ideas and names and what might be added and came up with a plan, at least four solid ideas for soaps and ideas for more.  I like that type of planning, it makes my brain go fizzing in all sorts of directions.

So ... the next set of blog posts will be about the Pure Essential Soap collection, the first being Zingara.

Zingara is made with Sweet Almond & Golden Olive Oils along with tons of creamy Cocoa Butter.  We then added Goatsmilk, Pink and White Clays, Colloidal Oatmeal & Pure Silk.

As I'm using only natural colours and fragrances, I decided to try out two colours (yeah, why do one when you can do two?).  The bottom layer of the soap is coloured using Pink Clay which came out a really lovely deep dusky pink and the top layer is coloured pale yellow using Tumeric - this was added to the soap at trace so it's given a lovely light speckle to the finished soap.  The line dividing both layers is my VERY FIRST Cocoa Line which I actually hadn't planned but then, once the pink layer was poured, I decided to just go for it.  I was a little nervous as I know that the soap can split along this line if the cocoa is put on too thickly so I was very careful.  Hubs was fascinated by this and watched over me doing this.  I wanted to shadow the use of this cocoa again in the soap so decided, at the end of making it and making the textured tops, to dust the cocoa, very sparingly, on the top of the soap, once made.

Whilst I use white clay in almost every soap now (great for all skin types, even sensitive and dry, and adds a lovely glide to the soap .. plus its great for use as a shaving soap too), I hadn't ventured very much into coloured clays until I started using them with the Pure Beer Collection.

Pink Clay is excellent for dry, sensitive & mature skin types and is just a lovely colour.  It has a softening affect that refines the skin texture & provides hydration through moisturising properties. This delicate clay has firming and toning elements that improve connective tissue so it is perfect for more sensitive skin types.

I really wanted to use Goatsmilk in the soap as I'm a huge fan of it's skin loving benefits.  It's packed with vitamins A, B6, B12 and E and is a wonderful natural emollient. The high content of capric, caprylic and caproic acids act as a natural AHA, exfoliating deal skin cells and balancing the pH of the new, healthy skin underneath.

When we were discussing colours and fragrances, I'd just taken delivery of stunning 5 Fold Orange and a Pink Grapefruit essential oils.  I just had to use them.  To deepen the fragrance and soften it, I added the Bourbon Geranium (which, any who buys essential oils lately, knows how expensive it's become) and I anchored the whole blend with some Dark Indonesian Patchouli - one of my favourite essential oils, it adds a depth and warmth to a blend.

So, do you want to see some pictures? Oh yeah!!! Here you go....

Zingara is available to pre-order now online, http://www.iamhandmade.com/ourshop/prod_2027227-Zingara-PreOrder-Cure-Date-13-June.html, so make sure to order as soon as possible before these are sold out.