Dear Tuesday

Let's make a deal. I will make my way through you without complaining about how tired and fed up I am, and in return you will let me spend the evening making perfumes. Nothing will happen to prevent this, because I will be a good girl and work hard and be efficient and smile when required. You will not throw any more bad news at me. I will not get home and decide I'm too tired to do anything except mope on the sofa. I have IDEAS! and you and I will work together to see them actually happen. I have Hellraiser and Ginger Snaps and anime and Hobbit perfumes in my head and I want to actually spend the night in the kitchen making them. I don't want to do a ton of housework. I don't want to have to go to Tesco. I don't want even want to write, mostly because I already did a fair bit of writing this morning that I'm happy with. I want to turn the kitchen into an alchemy den and make stuff smell pretty.

I don't think I'm being unreasonable. I've done a fairly remarkable job of being efficient, pleasant, and on the ball at work since Dad passed away, and at home I've managed not to be a complete wreck too most of the time. I think I've earned this. In short, I want to spend the evening enjoying myself. So please try not to throw anything nasty or difficult at me. No incorrect invoices. No missing patient files. No annoying phone calls. No trauma. No drama. We can do this, Tuesday.

Sincerely,
Me

Look what I got!

Expect the launch of Common Brimstone Fragrances early in the New Year! ^_^

A long-awaited alchemy report

So there has been radio silence for a while, but as it's looking pretty likely I'll be able to open shop early in the New Year, I think I should get back in the saddle. Also, I have been making lots of pretty things! I won't talk about all of them (need to keep some element of mystery going), so here's a quick rundown of my favourites:

Win: Mat Zemlya - patchouli, lime, ylang ylang, honey, sweet orange. Patchouli for me is one of those oils that works brilliantly when you use it right and fails miserably when you use it wrong (I won't discuss my patchouli/clary sage mix *weeps*). This perfume is one that works brilliantly. Patchouli and citrus are made to go together, and ylang ylang can do no wrong as far as I'm concerned. I think patchouli lovers will really enjoy this.

Pin-Up - parma violet, vanilla, strawberry, rose, cherry, baby powder. This is such a cheeky, girly mix. The baby powder has the potential to be a bit overwhelming, but I love it. It's really fun and sweet.

Godfrey's Cordial - poppy, honey, vanilla, cinnamon, clove - inspired by the Victorian era "cure-all." I'm a big fan of honey (both actual honey and honey fragrance oil), and I love this scent. It's warm and cosy. I can't imagine it cures any illnesses, but it might lift your mood.

Several brave volunteers will be testing these (and others) in the near future before I decide on my shop's opening range. Yay!

Fail: I really wanted to make an aquatic/flower blend with my new oils, and had a lovely idea for a mix of clove, sea notes, and tuberose topped with frangipani. Sadly a mislabelled bottle meant I got vanilla instead of frangipani. The end result was nice, but not as light or floral as I wanted, so I scrapped it. Back to the drawing board on that one. I also ended up binning a couple of other blends that didn't quite work out as planned. Some may be reformulated; others will be consigned to history.

Coming up: Hopefully by the end of this week I'll have millions and millions of new mixing bottles and I can get cracking on some other ideas I've had brewing. I'm getting all excited about the Hobbit film next month, so expect one or two Hobbity-scents to appear. Given the encroaching cold weather, I want to make some deep, warm scents using hot buttered rum and pumpkin fragrances. And thanks to my current obsession with the Hellraiser films, I want to make some Cenobite-inspired solid perfumes. Think lots of leather, vanilla, and spice. Om.

Adventures in Lemongrass: Can't sleep without it

One of the therapeutic effects of lemongrass that really interests me is its use as a sedative. I am a terrible sleeper. My mum likes to reminisce about how I've always been a bad sleeper like it's some kind of special skill. I wake up at the drop of a hat. I wake up when I roll over in bed. I wake up when the neighbours go up to bed. When the cat snores. When my fiance rolls over. When anything happens, basically. If I get through the night and only wake up once, it's a good night. So I thought I could use some of my oodles of lemongrass oil to help me tackle this raging insomnia that plagues me.

For the past two or three weeks I've been burning lemongrass oil in the bedroom at night. I have to admit, the smell is a bit overwhelming at first - it probably goes without saying that lemongrass is very lemony-smelling and I initially associated it more with cleaning products than sleepy times. But it is quite a tranquil scent and now I'm used to it in the room at night, I miss it if I forget it. I suppose there's a certain psychological element in there - now I associate it with being in bed at night rather than cleaning my bath. It's part of the bedtime routine now.

I don't think it helps me get to sleep any faster than normal but seriously. I sleep deeply. Usually I remember a lot of my dreams in great detail because I wake up so much and don't get much REM sleep (the brain chemicals that are needed to convert short-term memories to long-term are suppressed during REM). The past couple of weeks, every time I've burned lemongrass oil before bed, I've slept deeply enough and long enough that I don't remember a single dream. I consider that something of an achievement.

I do still wake up at least once a night - Fergus will not be ignored when he wants feeding - but I fall asleep again much faster than I used to. Normally waking up in the night meant lying there staring at the ceiling for hours making lists of Pokemon in my head (what? It works), but I can generally fall asleep again much faster now. The nights I've forgotten to get my oil burner going, it's taken me a lot longer to fall asleep (sometimes the very act of getting ready for bed wakes me up all over again, which seems grossly unfair).

I don't know how much of this is a genuine effect of the lemongrass or just a psychosomatic thing, but what the hell, I'll take it.

Alchemy Report

I thought I might get in the habit of a weekly update on the perfumes I've been playing with. Some of them will eventually appear in my Etsy shop when it opens; others will be just for me and some will be banished to the Fail Bin. So! Here's what's been happening this week.

Win: A perfume oil inspired by my current D&D character class - Duskblade. It's such an evocative word, I couldn't resist. Duskblade is a vanilla and black musk base, with notes of leather, black pepper, plum and violet mixed in. I'm testing it this evening and it is a definite win for me. The black pepper and plum hits first, then tapers down to the violet. I was worried the violet would be overwhelming (it's a pretty big, noisy floral), but I think the leather and vanilla are weighing it down a bit so it's not in-my-face flowery. I can't really pick up the black musk but I can tell there's "something" else in there. The plum and black pepper keep peeking back through, too. I really love this ^_^

Fail: I picked up a whiskey fragrance oil last week and needed to make a blend inspired by Ethan Banning. I mixed the whiskey with leather, sandalwood, and apricot and...it just stank of whiskey. I was hoping it'd be mostly spicy-smooth from the sandalwood with hints of fruit and booze, but no. It's just booze. It smelt quite nice, but it wasn't at all what I was aiming for and certainly nothing I'd ever wear, so it got scrapped. I'm still determined to make the blend work though; I need to learn that less is more with alcoholic scents. I have the same problem with sweet rum - I think I'm putting in just enough and it ends up overwhelming everything else.

Just for me: I also got a white chocolate fragrance oil and thought I'd try that with some white florals and a bit of lemon. I was hoping for something a bit delicate and mysterious, but as with the whiskey, the white chocolate overwhelmed all the other notes. It smells amazing, but again it's not really something I'd wear as a perfume. It's too delicious to scrap though, so I'm going to use it as a bath oil or in an oil burner.

I will probably be looking for guinea pigs for Duskblade in the near future, so if you like the sound of it, stay tuned!

Perfume Lab: Mess is messy

So I've just wrapped up an experimental and messy perfume lab. Experimental because I'm still working on getting my solid perfumes the consistency I want. I've moved from just beeswax and carrier oil to beeswax, oil, and shea butter, and that's much better. So today I thought I'd try just oil and shea butter. This is not a bad idea in theory...In practice, they take forever to set and I get impatient and want to shake and poke them, and that just makes it all worse. I've got two chilling in my fridge right now to speed the process along. It'll be interesting to see how they are when they're ready, if the shea butter carries the scent as well as beeswax. If it does work well, I'll be investing in some cocoa butter too (I want to anyway, for lotion bars) and trying a mix with that in it.

Pictured: eternal cleanliness.

Messy because I made a regular beeswax/butter/oil mix and spilled it everywhere, so the tin I was using got waxed to the sideboard, and I couldn't move the tin without spilling more, so I've had to let it set on the sideboard. While that was happening, I starting cleaning up and discovered an amazing cheat for cleaning the kitchen:

Don't clean it. Just drop an entire bottle of pine essential oil all over it and it will smell clean forever and ever and ever. We'll ignore the fact that my kitchen (and the entire downstairs of my house) smells a bit like a bathroom. It smells like a clean bathroom. I don't use pine EO very often, so it's not a massive pain, but I know now I hardly have any left I'll find a million things I want to do with it.

Anyway... I've just been and cleaned up all the wax and oil and taken my shea butter perfumes out of the fridge. I'm pleased to announce they smell gorgeous! I think this is the way forward. I'm keen to experiment with different carrier oils as well - jojoba and fractionated coconut oil are high on my wish-list. I've got a new delivery of fragrance oil and empty bottles arriving sometime soon so further experimentations can begin in earnest! And without throwing oil all over the house maybe.

Adventures in Lemongrass: Cellulite-busting moisturiser (maybe)

One of the many things lemongrass essential oil is supposed to be good for is tackling cellulite. It works by helping to reduce fluid retention and increase blood flow (excessive fluid retention is one cause of cellulite). I thought a moisturiser would be a simple way to use up some oil and test the theory. First thing I did: select some other oils to use in my moisturiser. I chose coffee and grapefruit.

I use coffee grinds quite a lot in facial scrubs already as it's good for reducing puffiness*, and coffee essential oil is another good one for reducing the appearing of cellulite.

Grapefruit is, again, good for cellulite busting, as well as dull skin. It's also just a lovely, uplifting fragrance and if I'm going to rub something into my thighs it may as well be an uplifting experience.

So! Having selected my oils, the next step was to whack them all together with scientific precision. I gathered my tools:

Here we have sweet almond oil as a carrier, vitamin E oil for added skin-nourishing goodness, an empty bottle, my essential oils, and some pipettes and a funnel for scientific precision. 

I combined sweet almond oil and vitamin E oil without spilling it all over myself and the kitchen:

I filled the bottle about three quarters full with sweet almond oil and topped it up to shoulder-height with vitamin E oil. Not pictured: oil slick. Next, I added in my essential oils.

A little goes a long way with essential oils, so you don't need to add much of any to get the benefits. I used three drops of each and then gave the bottle a good shake.

Ta-da! It was that easy. Here's the finished product, sitting on top of my usual moisturiser, virgin coconut oil. As you can see, this isn't a very big bottle; I imagine it will last me about a week, which probably isn't long enough to see any real results. But it was so stupidly easy to make, I'm planning to try it out for a month and see if there's any benefits. I don't really examine my body that closely as a rule so I don't really know if I have significant amounts of cellulite to begin with. I'm just assuming I do because, you know, I'm a female person. Regardless of whether it works (or indeed whether I need it), it does smell good and that's always a bonus.

*I believe this is the technical terminology. 

Adventures in Lemongrass

So one of the companies I order essential oils from sends you a free bottle of lemongrass EO whenever you spend over a certain amount. As a result, I currently have four bottles of lemongrass oil and not much to do with them. It's not an oil I use very much in perfume-making, so far. But it has a ton of beneficial properties including:

1. Reducing pain and inflammation
2. Insect repellent
3. Sedative properties
4. Curing cellulite

There are lots of other things it does, but these four interest me particularly because:

1. I suffer from severe RSI in my right arm and the best advice my doctor can give me is "don't use that arm and do use anti-inflammatories." Which...is not terribly helpful. I had some success over the summer using essential oil massages to manage the pain (I used a mix of ginger, cardamom and wintergreen), and now the cold weather is setting in and bringing all the seasonal aches and pains I get with it, I think this is a good time to try lemongrass massages.

2. We live in a very nice village. Unfortunately it's just down the road from a recycling plant, which means there are lots of flies. Lots of flies. We've tried fly sprays and those sticky window things you get, but the flies just spit in our faces and keep on living. Earlier this week we tried lemongrass oil in a burner. I am pleased to report the house is now fly-free, although that could be partly down to Fergus's efforts.

The mighty fly-killer at rest.

3. I am the world's lightest sleeper. I wake myself up turning over in bed. At the moment I'm going through a patch of insomnia, so the sedative/relaxing properties of lemongrass are rather appealing right now.

4. Curing cellulite - well, why not?

So! I'm going to experiment with all these things and report back. I'm already plotting how I can mix lemongrass oil and coffee grind as a body scrub...Stay tuned!

"If you want to gather honey, don't kick over the beehive."

I have never been a high-maintenance girl. I still own and regularly wear a hoodie I bought when I was 16, ffs. I didn't bother with make-up until I was at university, which put me about six years behind all my female friends. I hate clothes shopping and I never bought into the idea of expensive beauty products. I remember seeing a uni housemate spend £60 on a jar of moisturiser once and just about passing out from shock. That was like two weeks of food shopping, gone on this pot of cream that, as far as I could tell, didn't do anything. I was actually a bit offended by it.

About my only real indulgence on that front is Lush's shampoos and conditioners. They are stupid expensive, but my hair is a bit special, and the big bottles last me about three months, so it seems worth it.

Anyway. Since I started experimenting with all the natural beauty stuff last year, I've definitely become convinced there's no need to be high maintenance. One bottle of honey at a cost of less than £2 lasts me about four months and makes such a good face wash that I don't need to use facial moisturiser. One jar of coconut oil at £5 lasts a good two months and makes amazing body moisturiser, deep conditioner, eye make-up remover, and in Kyle's case, beard conditioner. Baking soda is so cheap it's not even funny, and it lasts forever. I've really reached the point where I just don't get why I ever did anything different. I've given up synthetic perfumes altogether - the smells just aren't right now I'm used to my own home-made ones.

Not everything works. I was experimenting with oil based night-moisturisers this week. I'm not really sure why, because I don't think it's something my skin needs, but it just seemed like it might be fun. I made a concoction of sweet almond oil, vitamin E oil, and lavender and palma rose oils. Used it for three days - yes, my skin is all soft and dewy, but I also got pretty bad spots, which I normally never get unless my diet takes a turn for the junky. I read online you're supposed to stick with oil-based treatments like this for two weeks before deciding whether they work or not, to let your skin adjust, but...well, no. I'm going to use the mixture as body moisturiser instead.

Next stop is body lotion bars to replace shower gel. I need cocoa butter and more shea butter, and I've ordered some ground apricot stones to throw in as an exfoliant. Eventually, aside from the little make-up I wear, I'd love every beauty/cosmetic/health product in my house to be natural and homemade.

I've toyed with the idea of going no-shampoo, but honestly I think for me that's a step too far. Homemade shampoo bars may be a possibility? I'm a bit overwhelmed by most of the recipes I've seen for that. But it's something to aim for in the future. I get a lot of satisfaction from the whole natural beauty kick, especially when something works really well.