"Imagination needs moodling - long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering." - Brenda Ueland

Timeless Photography

So my brother got married this Saturday just gone (congratulations to them!) and on Monday I took a day off my day-job to catch up on the perfume orders that got backlogged due to wedding prep. And then I started on a project I've been excited about since I decided to open Common Brimstone in the first place.

Solid perfumes!

I've been obsessed with perfumes for well over a decade now, but the moment I moved from "I like wearing this stuff" to "I want to make this stuff!" was when I found this post on Crunchy Betty's website. It was a pretty major revelation to me that making perfume might be that easy - I'd viewed it as this arcane alchemical process that was far beyond my reach. But no. Turns out it's really as easy as beeswax and oils. So I rushed to the internet and bought a few bars of beeswax, some lip balm tins and four or five bottles of essential oil (I remember saying those four or five bottles would give me plenty of scope and variety...Now I have well over 200 bottles of fragrance and essential oils and I can't help looking back at Past Me and smiling fondly at my naivety).

And I made so many solid perfumes. So many. So many I ended up giving a lot away because I ran out of storage room. I was driving my fiance mad by turning the kitchen into a wax-and-oil smeared mess every night of the week. I loved it. It was like witchcraft. Just add a few drops of rose to a few drops of lime and vetiver, and voila. Magic. And once I got the confidence to start making perfumes and found that other people liked what I was making, moving onto perfume oils was inevitable. And here we are.

So why didn't I launch the shop with solid perfumes? Mostly because I felt oils would be more popular and offered me more room to experiment with blends. My experience with solid perfumes is that you can really only use up to four different oils before you lose the clarity of the scent - any more and the fragrance gets a little muddy. So I didn't want to just offer solid versions of my perfume oils. I didn't want to start adding solid perfumes to my catalogue until I was sure I was making the best ones I possibly could.

num_skyman

And that brings me to this Monday when I finally had time to do what I wanted: create a seasonal range of solid perfumes, inspired by the autumn and winter. I talked last week about how inspiring I find this time of year: all those gorgeous colours, all that homely comfort food...It all seemed like the perfect starting point for a collection of warm, cosy, simple scents in solid form.

I've been gathering ideas for months and it was really satisfying to start working on those blends. Right now I've got ten very different blends aging away in my dark box, and this weekend I'll do some final tinkering before I make them into actual solid perfumes for testing. Fingers crossed, that means you'll be able to buy my Autumn/Winter range at Etsy and Folksy by the end of September. And then I can start thinking about the Spring/Summer range!

So what will you be getting that you can't get with my perfume oils? Well, there's no risk of leaks or broken bottles for one thing. I love the portability of solid perfumes and tend to have one tucked away everywhere for emergencies - in my bag and in my desk at work especially (that's also where I keep my emergency tea stash). I'll be using vegan-friendly soy wax, blended with creamy shea butter and the same skin-loving sweet almond oil I use in my perfume oils. And if you want some hints at the kind of scents I'll be offering, how does Caramel Macchiato sound? Or Winter Sun? Or Autumn Rose, Haunted Heart, or Fireflies?

My babies!

Yeah, I think they sound good too ^_^

"“Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it...

...and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.” - George Eliot

There is something about the summer's end and the beginning of the autumn that puts me in a more creative mood. I think it's because the mental image I have of autumn is so beautiful and romantic, I can't help but feel inspired. In my head, autumn looks like this:

Ebgeni Dinev

But in reality, in Cambridge at least, autumn is really like this:

Pakorn

You can see it's not really the same, but every year I keep hoping I'll miraculously get a gorgeous New England autumn and pumpkin-flavoured treats will magically appear everywhere.

Anyway. In the mean time, I'm working on some beautiful autumnal fragrances to try to evoke the mood, if not the weather, I expect at this time of year. I've already got some lush, warm perfumes in the shop that are perfect for the change of seasons, like Abhaile, Habondia, and Oshun, and once my latest batch of fragrance oils arrives you can expect to hear me rave excitedly about sticky toffee and buttered pecan scents. Nothing says "autumn" to me more than good foodie and cosy spice blends when it comes to perfume. And pumpkin, of course. There has to be pumpkin. And mulberry. And blackcurrant. Possibly all together.

Arvind Balaraman

And there will be solid perfumes too! I've been wanting to add solid perfumes to the shop since I opened, but it's taken me a while to decide exactly what I want to do and how. I'll talk more about those next week (yes, I am aiming to blog more often, so may as well set the deadline now), but my launch range will be created with autumn and winter in mind, so look out for dark, delicious, intriguing and unusual (and vegan-friendly!) solid perfumes in the very near future.

The other awesome thing about this time of year is Halloween, of course. Again, my mental image of Halloween is never quite matched by the reality - we've had no trick-or-treaters for two years! :( - but I can at least watch terrible b-movies 24-hours a day if I want to.

And I can make terrible b-movie perfumes! (Well, they won't be terrible. They'll be amazing! But they'll be inspired by terrible b-movies). Again, this is something I'll talk about a bit more closer to October. In the mean time, here's something to give you an idea of what's in store...

I'm now on Folksy too!

As an experiment in expanding my horizons, I've started listing at Folksy, a UK-based seller very similar to Etsy. I haven't put all my stock up there yet, but will be adding slowly and surely. Etsy is definitely my main focus, but I love the idea of a UK-based platform so I'm going to give it a try until the end of the year and see what happens.

Things To Do With Green Tea (other than the obvious thing)

Image courtesy of zirconicusso at FreeDigitalImages.net

So I'm a bit of a tea junkie, a fact that became apparent at the day job when our purchasing officer came to give me a package and found the eight million (approx) packets of loose leaf tea I keep in my desk. Discussion ensued and the next day he presented me with two giant bags of Japanese green tea. I feel it's important to state that Japanese green tea is the really, really good stuff and honestly doesn't compare to your old Twinings tea bag nonsense. It's got a great, deep, toasty flavour to it, it tastes delicious, and I now have a lot of it. I'm keeping the genmaicha at work to share with the purchasing officer, but I took the other bag of regular green tea home to add to my small (approx) collection of loose leaf tea there.

And then I realised I had a lot of green tea and decided to see what else I could do with it apart from drink it, and the internet provided many an idea. Green tea is rich in antioxidants and can (maybe) help reduce wrinkles and signs of aging, as well as helping with sun damage. As I never go out into direct sunlight on general principles, that last one isn't really a problem for me, but I assume other people do sometimes venture outdoors before dark...

1. Freeze it.

This came courtesy of the amazing Crunchy Betty. Brew a strong cup of green tea and make ice cubes from it. They're anti-inflammatory so they work great as quick spot/blemish treatments. I've taken to keeping a tray in the freezer at all times and the ice cubes really do work if you use them a couple of times a day on clean skin. You can also do this with chamomile tea apparently, but I haven't tried that yet.

2. Make toner/cleanser with it.

I found this article and figured using loose leaf tea would be just as good (if not better) than using tea bags. I don't use commercial creams or cleansers, so rather than mixing green tea with a shop-bought cream, I've been making a mixture with lemon juice and storing it in the fridge. It keeps for about a week, and I've been swiping it over my face every evening after I take my make-up off. The lemon juice acts as a mild exfoliant and can help reduce acne/scarring as it's antibacterial.

3. Make a face mask with it.

There are a ton of ideas for natural face masks all over the internet, depending what you're looking for. My current favourite ingredients are kaolin clay, cocoa powder (another anti-oxidant), lavender, and oatmeal. But I recently got a whole bunch of other dried herbs that are supposed to be great for your skin, so I've been mixing and matching a lot. I ground up a few spoonfuls of green tea leaves with some thyme, lavender and kaolin clay and have been using it once a week. In addition to smelling amazing, it leaves your skin all soft and lush. I also made up a batch with green tea, oatmeal and cocoa at Christmas for my sister-in-law, and she loves it (although my brother is less keen because apparently she blocked their sink with it somehow? Not sure I need to be involved with that debate however).

4. Make a body scrub with it.

I love making sugar scrubs with shea butter - they're exfoliating, moisturising, and you can make them smell like chocolate. Plus there's the added bonus of leaving a slippery residue all over the shower, creating an adventure for the next person to use it. Shea butter can be messy to work with though, so green tea leaves make a quick and clean alternative - simply mix them up in an oil of your choice and scrub away! I tend to use either grapeseed or fractionated coconut oil, but in an emergency olive oil is as good as anything. You could throw in a bit of coffee or sugar too for added scrubby powers.

5. Rinse your hair with it.

Another one you can also do with chamomile tea. Brew a pot, pour it into an appropriate container, wash your hair as normal, then rinse with the tea. Bonus! Add essential oils for extra care. I tend to add rosemary if I do this, and there's a good list here of oils for different hair types. This gives extra shine or, in the case of chamomile tea, extra blondeness.

If you're using green tea bags, keep 'em after you've steeped 'em - the cool bags can be rubbed over your face as a toner or under your eyes to get rid of dark circles.

And for the record, actually just drinking green tea can have health benefits, allowing you to feel extra smug about the whole thing and not at all secretly wishing it was hot chocolate.

Image courtesy of Arvind Balaraman at FreeDigitalImages.net

Flash Sale this weekend!

I'm having a Flash Sale at the perfume shop this Saturday, 22nd June (assuming I can get the app to work...)! Everything at Common Brimstone will be 20% off for one day only. That's all 5ml vials, all sample sets, and all individual samples. Everything!

I'm so, so happy with how well my little venture has been going since February and since so many people here and else where on t'internet have Tweeted and liked and Facebooked to spread the word, I figure it'll be nice to say thank you ^_^

The Great Honey Badger Giveaway

If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you'll know I'm road testing potential new perfumes for the shop this week. Today it's Honey Badger, a blend of beeswax and cocoa absolute with a teensy bit of dark chocolate, a dash of honeycomb, and a base of white and black musk. I LOVE IT. The dark chocolate and beeswax notes pop out first, and it melts down to a sweet honey-musk finish that's not too saccharine. I want you all to try it, so...how about a giveaway?

 Just "like" or comment on this post and I'll draw a winner on Wednesday 19th June. The winner gets a 5ml bottle of this exclusive, yet-to-be-released scent. Easy!

And hey, spread the word, because if I hit 50 or more likes on my Facebook page in this time, I'll do something else fabulous for you all!

3 Days of Silence

I can't believe it's only been two days since this story broke. I think Edward Snowden has raised a lot of questions and worries, and for a lot of people confirmed a lot of theories and fears. I'm really not politically savvy enough to drill down into all the ramifications of the NSA leaks, so I won't even try. You can definitely find out plenty without me. But what has that got to do with 3 Days of Silence?

So yesterday I saw Crunchy Betty post about this on Facebook, and the idea of going on a digital detox for a few days was appealing, but fleeting. And then she blogged about it today and the idea really took hold. Not just as an impromptu protest against all this surveillance and 1984 paranoia, but as a break from the constant influx of internets in my life. The first thing I do every morning is check my emails on my phone. I catch up on Twitter and Facebook while I'm drying my hair. I read the news or ebooks on my phone on the bus to work. At work I'm constantly online, answering emails, researching, and doing things I'm not really supposed to be doing from a work computer. At home in the evenings I'm chatting on Facebook, browsing the Etsy forums, gaming, and generally immersing myself in the web.

That's, you know, a lot of time at a computer. And I started thinking of all the things I keep saying I have no time for, that I definitely would have time for if I had a couple of days computer-free. And all the things I used to do before I had internet access and how I filled my days before Twitter and Cracked.com. And I think now especially, when I'm feeling low and struggling with my sense of self, disconnecting from the digital world and spending some time outside of cyberspace might be really nice and useful.

So I'm going to do a "lite" version of this, since June 24th is a work day for me and I don't think my boss would be too pleased if I just ignored all digital communication for a day. But June 22nd and 23rd are my Silent Days. No phone except for emergencies, no internet, no TV. I'm going to read and make perfumes and scribble in notebooks. I'm going to see what I can make out of dried hyssop and green tea leaves. I'm going to dig out my rune stones and Tarot cards and re-learn some things. And if  it comes down to it, I'm going to poke my cat for entertainment.

He's usually pretty good value for money.