Sleepless Nights

Author: Veronica

  • We totally lucked out

    When we got a puppy recently, I thought about how we portray our lives on the Internet. We oftentimes just share the good bits and leave out the times we’re stuck shovelling crap uphill, presenting a glossy front to the Internet.

    Stopping mummyblogging was for me, the beginning of glossifying things. Not being able to write about the times my children have been a teensy bit annoying for fear of their school friends reading, is what I call glossifying. Of course, I do mention funny snippets, and bits and pieces, but on the whole, their lives are no longer mine to put on the Internet.

    There’s none of that consideration with a new puppy. I don’t need to worry about her puppy friends laughing at her in the playground and I am more than able to detail the antics of a naughty naughty puppy.

    Awesome, I thought. I’ll start blogging more again, sharing stories of Heidi the German Shepherd.

    What I hadn’t quite counted on was just how good this puppy was going to be.

    It’s eerie. And weird. Like, really weird. As the children run around the house in a tornado of mess and chaos, the puppy just sort of trots around watching everything, flopping at their feet when they stop playing, waiting for the inevitable pats.

    And sure, she gets nippy sometimes, but when you remind her that toddler legs are not tasty tasty chew toys, she remembers for at least an hour before I need to remind her to not chew on Evelyn again.

    At eight weeks old, and with three days of training, she will sit consistently, drop most of the time, and did an entire 5 seconds of staying yesterday.

    IT’S WEIRD.

    I think we lucked out, Internet.

    Of course writing this about Heidi is going to jinx us all to hell and she’s going to be the naughtiest pup ever.

    It hasn’t all been sunshine and roses – this morning Evelyn and the puppy tag teamed in order to wake me up at 4.30am and keep me awake. The morning was a little hellish as the energy I expended over Christmas caught up with me and nausea played havoc with my gut while my joints slid around like collagen is just not a thing they understand.

    However Evelyn and the pup both crashed out asleep at midday and I was able to grab a nap, so yay for not dying of sleep deprivation.

    It was a near thing for a while. I was half way through my third cup of tea, idly wondering why it tasted a little weird, when I realised I’d entirely forgotten to put milk in the cup. Whoops.

    I did end up making soap however, relying on my usual note taking to make sure today’s soap didn’t go awry.

    All in all, it’s been a good Christmas, but I’m glad to see the back of it. Ehlers Danlos makes everything that little bit harder. The beauty of having my own business of course is being able to nap in the middle of days and bring home a puppy who requires a lot of attention without feeling guilty about it.

    ANYWAY.

    As soon as the puppy does anything naughtier than weeing on the carpet because we didn’t take her outside fast enough after a nap, or funnier than trying to bite the cat on the tail, I will be here, immediately, sharing.

    Until then, you’ll just have to envy the softest puppy snuggles ever.

    Sable German Shepherd Puppy

    German Shepherd Puppy Yawning

    ——

    Wait, nevermind, she just bit me on the leg and drew blood. Go about your business people, it’s all okay. This puppy is not weird.

    ——

    Boxing Day Sale runs until the 31st of December. You should check out the shop and buy stuff.

     

  • Boxing Day Sales!

    So, I have a question. It is a sponsored post if you’re writing it for your own business? Because I’m going to tell you all about the amazing products I am selling right now, but I’m not paying myself.

    I’m probably overthinking this.

    ANYWAY

    Boxing Day Sales.

    We have a lot of soap in the house, and even more soap curing. My shelves are full of amazing soap, and I need to share them with people.

    It’s also boxing day, which means BOXING DAY SALES.

    At the moment, if you pop on over to our shop, we have a lot of soap selling for wholesale prices, as well as discounted Body Butter, Bath Salts, and lots and lots of lip balm.

    As a final note, we’ve got a few extra Holiday Gift Boxes discounted. Please buy them. They’re taking up room on my shelves. They’re awesome, and the box is reusable.

    YAY! SOAP!

    Everything will be on sale until the 31st of December, and then it’s back to regular prices. What are you waiting for? Go buy soap!

    IMG_4221

    Oatmeal Milk and Honey Soap

    Buttermilk Bath Bar Soap

    Spicy Christmas Soap

  • LOOK! Merry Christmas, Internet

    Merry Christmas Puppy

    Look who was ready to come home with us a few days before Christmas.

    Meet Heidi, a German Shepherd pup who is rather enjoying living with three children who feed her scraps of food.

    German Shepherd Pup running

    We had an excellent Christmas, the children got lots of presents they love and everyone is exhausted.

    I hope your day was as good as ours.

  • Palm free: I can’t change the world but I can take a stance

    Borneo by Rainforest Action Network

    [pic source]

    I don’t use palm oil.

    I mean, firstly, there is the environmental impact. Dead orang-utans, deforestation, cruelty and a long list of other things turned me off the idea of using palm oil in soap long before I even started making my own.

    Secondly, palm oil is kind of a hassle and when I hear soap makers complaining about having to melt the entire bucket of palm oil down and stir well before they use it, I’m glad my own personal ethics prevented me from even experimenting with palm oil in the early days.

    But that’s the thing about ethics, they’re tricksy and they hold me to a far higher standard than any other person truly could.

    Our entire business is based around the idea of making luxury soaps, along with bath and body products, and not using any palm derived ingredients along the way.

    This was an easy point of difference to hold while I was only making soap. The alternatives to pure palm oil in soap are many and varied and creating a palm free recipe truly wasn’t difficult.

    But lotions, man, lotions. Trying to work out how to make lotions without using anything palm derived has been a headache and a half.

    Firstly, there’s emulsifying wax. The main kind – Emulsifying Wax NF, contains palm derived ingredients.

    So our emulsifiers get tricky. I can buy olive derived emulsifier, but they tend to need more work to retain stability, as well as costing a good deal more, and requiring a higher percentage to work well.

    If I combine two different types of emulsifiers (olive derived), with a palm free thickener (xantham gum, or carrageenan), a lotion base containing high stearic ingredients (cocoa butter and shea butter), and a little wax (beeswax, cadelilla wax, or macadamia wax), I can get a stable lotion.

    But it’s more expensive than a cheap hand cream you buy from Kmart, or even a good hand lotion made using palm derived ingredients.

    Even trickier, some of the ingredients we commonly think of as palm derived, such as Cetyl Palmitate and Sorbitan Palmitate, are the main ingredients in a stabiliser derived entirely from olives. The problem is the fatty acids were named after they were found in large amounts in palm oil. Olive oil can still be broken down to make Cetyl Palmitate and Sorbitan Palmitate, just in much lower quantities.

    You can see my problem here, can’t you? Ingredients need to be queried over and over again with my suppliers and often times with their manufacturers. One of the most common preservatives on the market has an ingredient which may be palm derived, but it may also be synthetic and created in a lab. We’re still trying to work out which, and while we wait to hear from the manufacturers, I can’t buy or use the product.

    The benefits add up of course, despite the amount of time I spent frantically googling, and emailing suppliers, I get to feel comfortable with all of my products.

    I plan to start testing lotion recipes in the new year, using an entirely palm free recipe. When it eventually goes on sale (probably around September, to give time for effective challenge testing), the price won’t look like a bargain. I won’t have people exclaiming over how inexpensive my products are.

    However, the point isn’t to make the cheapest skincare products available. The point is to make amazing products entirely palm free, so I can sleep at night.

    —

    Someone once said, “soapmakers are such a small percentage of people using palm oil to make products, I don’t see how us avoiding palm changes anything.”

    And maybe it doesn’t. I am a very small maker in a world filled with Kmarts, and Coles-Myer groups, and no, I don’t always check my chocolate to make sure its palm free, so I might be a hypocrite.

    I can however, take a stand in this one small thing, because I can’t feel good about the things I make if I know I’m using ingredients derived from palm.

    It’s a complex issue and I really encourage you to do your own research on palm oil and what sustainable palm oil is (I haven’t been able to find any information on sustainable palm oil which convinces me to use it, although in other countries it can be quite different – I know the US has palm farms on US soil, so it may well be less awful to use palm there) and how everything is used.

    In the meantime, I’ll keep trying to untangle the threads of what each ingredient is derived from, and making what I can.

  • Chemicals are not a bad thing when it comes to beauty products

    We’ve all heard the spiel. “If you can’t pronounce it, you shouldn’t be putting it on your body!”

    The message is always the same. Chemicals are bad and natural is good. Natural is best. Natural is more important than anything.

    It’s not true.

    Before I started making all my own beauty products, I’d been trained the believe the hype too. The word natural has such strong connotations; we all look for it, consciously or subconsciously on our packaging.

    A few weeks into beginning to learn to make soap, I researched lotion making. The messages were clear. “YOU MUST USE PRESERVATIVE.”

    “But we don’t want to!” said the forums. “Aren’t there natural preservatives? Rosemary Oleoresin Extract? Vitamin E? SOMETHING?”

    Nope. Vitamin E is an anti-oxidant, not a preservative and while Rosemary Oleoresin Extract may protect your products for a short period, it’s merely due to the preservatives used to keep the ROE stable.

    Preservatives are not the devil.

    When I list my ingredients on my soap labels, I list common names. The law allows for that in soapmaking and I figure I’m not going to confuse anyone by calling something Olive Oil instead of Olea Europaea Fruit Oil, or Rice Bran Oil instead of Oryza Sativa Bran Oil, let alone using the terms Butyrospermum Parkii Fruit (Shea Butter), Cera alba (Beeswax), or Ricinus Communis Seed Oil (Castor Oil).

    You can see very quickly that the idea of “if you can’t pronounce it, don’t use it” doesn’t stand up very long when you’re talking about using INCI names.

    INCI (International Nomenclature of Cosmetic Ingredients) is the standard in a lot of countries for cosmetic labelling. I’m allowed to list common names here in Australia, but when it comes to things like preservatives, listing the INCI is safer.

    So something we can buy at a soaping supply store called “Germall Plus”, which has a common name sounding rather important to the safety of the product you’re buying, suddenly becomes Propylene Glycol (and) Diazolidinyl Urea (and) Iodopropynyl Butylcarbamate.

    It’s a necessary thing, to include a broad spectrum preservative in products containing water, such as lotions, moisturisers, toners, shampoos, conditioners, hand creams – the list goes on.

    Soap is a less complicated product because the high pH kills anything bad. Lip balms and other anhydrous (oil only) products are safe too without a preservative. But water containing products are not.

    Lotion makers have to content with mould, fungus, and bacteria. A good preservative stops all of those things.

    Tell me, why wouldn’t you want to be protected from that? I’m sure as hell not going to be putting a lotion anywhere near my body if it doesn’t contain a preservative somewhere.

    Far from the idea of “chemicals will cause you harm” – it’s the very lack of chemicals which would cause you harm in this case.

    And I’ve seen it done. Lotions being bandied about as preservative free and all natural and the absolute best for your body.

    I searched their entire site waiting for them to tell me they were joking like hahahaha, here’s the preservative, you’re all safe.

    Nope.

    Either they were lying on their marketing (bad) or they were selling a product which was unsafe to their customers (worse).

    As I research more and more, it becomes clearer than chemicals are not a bad thing when it comes to beauty products. After all, when you break it down, lots of completely natural things like Atropa belladonna will kill you dead, which isn’t unexpected for a plant with the common name Deadly Nightshade, but maybe it’s less expected if someone is listing INCI names.

    Atropa Belladonna is rather easy to pronounce don’t you think?

    So when you eventually see long and complicated ingredient lists on my products, keep in mind they’re there to protect you, not cause you harm.

    —

    Next time I’ll talk about some of the benefits chemicals bring to products like shampoo and conditioner, or skincare products.

    Remember – everything is made of chemicals. Even natural things.