No Tox Life Review

*HI GUYS*

((lol I am always buying or being gifted handmade soaps etc and I feel like I'm definitely qualified to basically publicly judge peoples' products online))

When I was in LA this summer I ran across this brand call No Tox Life while shopping at Melrose Trading Post (where I also met Tyler, the Creator!!). Melrose Trading Post is basically this huge open air market, and I had a lot of fun looking around at all the vintage clothes, jewelry, cameras.. there was a lot of cool stuff, and a lot of soapmakers there too! I like to ask a lot of questions to the people I see at soap booths, and I was surprised that lots of people couldn't tell me wether or not they were selling mp or cp...

I really love No Tox Life's concept and display, and I was impressed by the range of products they had at their booth and online. They really seem on top of things: they have a brick and mortar, attend four weekly markets, have a calendar full of special events, and products in stores around the country! They also hold workshops, which is cool and something I would like to do one day!

An excerpt from their website sums up everything:

No Tox Life is a locally made natural bath and body line. We are a women-owned and -operated company, and we make all of our products by hand in our Glassell Park workshop. We make 200+ different products, ranging from facial care, to deodorant, soap, lotions, bath salts and candles. We even have pet care and essential oils.

Pretty cool!

I had a hard time choosing which product to get.. everything looked so good and I am BAD at making decisions..but I settled on The Traveller Soap Collection. It includes 12 samples of cold process soap, and I'm really happy with it because it has great variety!

The collection came with 12 random samples, and as you can see everything is so pretty and small :) 

All natural, lots of herbs and EOs, although they do use mineral colorant, mica, and FOs. I've always been a fan of the natural look, but No Tox Life proves you can get a lot of nice colors and textures without synthetic materials. 

((I have to say I used some soaps up before I could write this post, idk why I didn't take photos of everything before I started using it smh))

Top Left: Spicy, musky fragrance. Brown color, I'm assuming this is due to vanillin content. Maroon mica on top: overall very pretty. 

Top Right: Soft, sweet fragrance. Definitely cinnamon and honey. Really love the oats on top and poppyseed for exfoliation! 

This soap has such a beautiful pale blue color!! It smells like tea tree. ((update: i think I found this bar here. If so, I was right with tea tree!)) ((update #2: might also be this bar))

This bar is really sweet smelling and earthy at the same time.. honestly it smells like cornbread. There is some type of exfoliant in here but I don't know what it is..I think its some type of flower. 

This smells like citrus too.. and some type of exfoliant that's making it speckled.

This is a really brightly colored bar! It definitely has citrus in it. 

This is a rose clay colored bar, and I think it's dried rose petals on top. Whatever it's scented with is not very strong and not a true rose scent. 

A calendula bar!! I've made a very similar soap in the past for my soap the rainbow

'yellow' entry. This has the same honey scent as the poppyseed soap. 

I think this is an oatmeal milk and honey type bar. It has that really lovely milky scent..one of my faves. There is ground oatmeal on top of and inside the soap! So yummy. ((update: found the bar here! Oats and Chamomile))

Smells like chocolate!! It's pretty spicy too, maybe there's chili powder in here. ((update: found the bar here!! Raw Peruvian Cacao WITH spicy chipotle. Dang I'm pretty good.))

Last but not least, this little coffee scented soap! It's gotta be ground coffee beans inside. I'm really excited to use all the exfoliating soaps bc I love feeling all the little gritty bits on my skin x)

I'm super excited to use all these beautiful little soaps!! The ones I used already had average lather, were not drying, but you could tell right away they were olive oil soaps because they have that slimy film and did not last very long time. I tried to keep them dry but even still they only lasted like 2 weeks being used every day. These soaps also stained a few washclothes, be careful when using naturally colored soaps that are dark from vanilla, coffee, cocoa etc because they do produce colored lather and will stain fabric, although my skin and the shower were fine.

The sampler cost me $12 before tax and that was for 12 samples, altogether just a little more than 1 bar of soap. 12 dollars for one bar is expensive, but you get great variety and its fun to use different soap all the time! I would recommend this product to anyone and it would make a great gift.

This was really fun to do, it was hard to review these soaps cuz I had to guess their identities from the No Tox Life website, but I liked doing this and I think I will do another SHORT one soon.
((Yay!! Ok this has been my longest post ever. Bye!))

Adventures in Epsom Salts: Episode One

((A really quick blog post, which is what I think I'm going to start doing from now on anyways because I always have time to do short projects but never long ones that warrant a full length post...))

Anyways

Dollar store epsom salt + old FOs = bath salts


All I did was pour a bit of salt into a couple of bottles of FOs that I won't use in important projects because they don't behave well, discolor, or I don't like how they smell. I read online that sometimes doing this can cause pressure to build up inside the glass bottle and cause an explosion...that didn't happen to me, but I left a little space in the top of the bottles and make sure to open them every once in awhile. The only time I've experienced pressure build up in a bottled product is with sodium bicarb.

Overall, this was a really easy product, great for not wasting any extra EOs or FOs you might have, but I would not recommend this method of making scented bath salts because the fragrance was definitely not incorporated well/thoroughly and it would have been really hard to color them if I had wanted to do that.

These work fine. Epsom salts are actually pretty fun, I might start using them in projects more frequently. 

Adventures in Melt and Pour: Episode One

Let's just get right into it: I have done mp in the past and I started soapmaking with mp (I was 12, too young for cp) but I am wholly uncomfortable doing mp projects aside from simple embed projects. So this summer I am challenging myself to get out of my comfort zone and do a series of mp soaps. My idea is to take several photos from Instagram and try to recreate them in melt and pour...it's gonna be real interestin'! Hopefully I will get more experience with layers, temperature, etc.

My first soap from this series was inspired by Paloma Barbiezinha, who I absolutely love. I took a photo from her Instagram. She's an amazing fashion blogger from Brazil and I love her vibe because it is very colorful and positive.

Here's my take:

I don't love how the colors turned out. There is not as much detail as I would like there to be. But, I have to remind myself, this is my first one.

This whole process actually took quite a bit of time. I poured the blue background in around a cardboard cutout to create empty space for the body, and then I poured in the brown skin and finally the pink hair and clothes as the last layer. There were lots of little mistakes and holes that I had to smooth over using my finger or the blunt end of a bamboo skewer.

Overall, I had a good time! I can't wait to improve on my mp skills from here.

Bramble Berry Haul + Review

This Christmas my lovely sister got me 7 items from Bramble Berry as gifts, 3 fragrance oils and 4 colorants. In this post I will go through the items I got and I will update this post through January as I test all of them ☺️ ⭐️

-The Fragrances- 

Before I go through descriptions of these fragrances, I would like to say that my past experience with BB FOs is pretty poor. In my opinion, most fragrances from Bramble Berry smell strange, they are always either too strong or too weak, they fade too much in cold process soap, or are just not good fragrances. I find that I usually have to blend several BB FOs together to get a result I actually like. For some people I can see how the experience of blending fragrances could be appealing, but I prefer to bypass the complications of blending fragrances. I think the major issue I find with BB FOs is they usually smell very strong of a particular note of the fragrance: for example, most 'bakery' or 'fruity fragrances smell wayyy too sweet for my liking. And many 'green' fragrances have a really strong plant smell- for some reason, I have accumulated many of such FOs in my studio, and the main offenders I am thinking of right now are "Green Smoothie" "Lettuce" and "Grass Stain" FOs. If you do not like soaps that smell like salad or grass clippings, I would avoid any of those. On the other hand, the Bramble Berry's floral fragrances I have tested have performed very well and smell ok, but smell like perfume as opposed to natural flowers. This is a matter of preference, but the floral FOs I have tried from Bramble Berry in their Spring Sampler tend to smell heavy and powdery like an older women's perfume. One thing I do love about BB FOs is they behave very well with almost no discoloration and they are good for CP as well as MP soap.

-Espresso- 

goo.gl/NPoGqg

This is a very strong fragrance, like fake coffee or coffee with artificial creamer in it. My sister described it as "sweet and nutty", and it is very sweet, which is typical of food type BB FOs (see above). This fragrances is also very warm and has notes of cinnamon and some type of candy. I would probably add some ground coffee to a soap fragrances with Espresso just to make the scent smell more like real coffee and less like sugary candy.

-Fresh Bamboo- 

goo.gl/3BQWcP

This FO smells like your typical laundry detergent, liquid hand soap or aerosol spray. A cleaning product with this fragrance would be sold under the name "Fresh Scent" or "Fresh Cotton" or something along those lines. This fragrance is not earthy or natural, but there are notes of citrus, lily, jasmine and rose. As far as 'bamboo' fragrances go, I prefer Elements Bath and Body's Bamboo Sugarcane FO. 

-Pumpkin Spice- 

goo.gl/VYO7BX

This FO was my personal favorite out of the three. I've never experienced a Pumpkin Spice whatever, but I imagine that a PSL would taste as good as BB's Pumpkin Spice FO smells. There are strong hints of pumpkin and pastry dough, and although this fragrance smells sweet, its not overpoweringly sugary. I think this is my favorite out of the three because it really smells like pumpkin and spices. This FO smells most like I would imagine it to based off of its name.



I will continue to update this post with photos and text as I experiment with each new product.



 None of the pictures on this blog are mine unless otherwise credited. 

My Instagram

Please follow my soapmaking instagram ~ I plan to stay busy on my blog but I update it a lot more often and I have more photos there.

Faux Funnel Pour

Some photos from my most recent project, a faux funnel type pour made in my Brambleberry 1 lb mold. 

I got five little slices out of this batch and I love this mold size as it is perfect for testing new recipes. For testing fragrances and colorants, I like to create a 1 lb batch of my usual recipe but separate the newly colored or fragranced soaps in a silicone muffin pan.