Thursday, June 3, 2010

We Want You to Know

Really, we do.

We want you to know what you're using. We want you to pay attention to what your putting on your body. To that end, we have finally come up with Reef Botanicals labeling and packaging with which we're happy.  You can see it in the photo of our very cool Father's Day gift basket.  But to make it easier, here's a close-up.


Pretty, right?  Great for gifting to others or to yourself.  But it's more than pretty.

We wanted to keep the packaging as minimal as possible, so where outer packaging isn't absolutely necessary (like it is for our liquid products such as shaving oils and scrubs), we've done away with it almost completely.  Each bar of soap now comes to you like a gift, tied with a bit of natural hemp twine, which holds a pretty slip of paper telling you what variety of soap it is and every single ingredient contained therein.

Now... the FDA doesn't actually require labeling on soap, but we have nothing to hide and we actually want you to know what you're putting on your body.  As another rather intelligent soaper correctly said to me, and I might be paraphrasing here, if you wouldn't eat it, why would you want it on your skin?  After all, things you put on your skin eventually get soaked into your skin.  Want an example?  That's how nicotine patches work!

Of course, cosmetic (i.e. non-soap) items, like our scrubs, lip balms, and bath bombs, do require proper labeling, which is to say the labels need to comply with INCI nomenclature.  What the heck is INCI?  INCI means International Nomenclature of Cosmetic Ingredients, and there's a standard way of listing each ingredient on an item.  Since we had to so that for the non-soap items, we just went ahead and did it for the soaps too!

From now on, every product you receive from us will be labeled as you see in that nifty close-up with the INCI ingredient list.  As we edit the site, they'll be up there too!  And if you have any questions about any of our ingredients, please feel free to email us at store@reefbotanicals.com.  We do pay attention!

And in case you're wondering, yes, we hand-make every single label and hand-tie it to every bar of soap.  Doesn't get much more handmade than that!

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