We have a winner!

We used random.org to pick the winner of our very first blog giveaway and it is...

drumroll...

Megan of Mommy Minded, who said:

Congrats to Megan!  She's being emailed imminently and will have 48 hours in which to respond and claim her prize, the "For Your Face" gift pack!

Our First Blog Giveaway!

This contest is closed.

We're feeling like a giveaway to celebrate the release of our new product:

Almond Pastry Facial Scrub

It smells great, is easy to use, and makes skin glow!

What you get out of this is a For Your Face Gift Pack, containing one full size shaker container of this awesome new scrub, one bar of our Purity soap, and one bar of our Oatmeal Honey soap, all great for your face!

You have SIX chances to win!  For each entry, leave a separate comment on this post to let us know, one comment per entry task completed.

Rules:
1.  This giveaway is open to everyone in the U.S. and Canada.
2.  There will be one winner chosen.
3.  The winner will be notified by email, and will have 48 hours in which to respond.  If the winner does not respond, a new winner will be chosen.

**Please make sure you provide a valid email address when entering this giveaway.**

Mandatory Entry:
Please become a follower of this blog, then visit Reef Botanicals and leave a comment on this post telling us what you would love to have from the shop.

Additional Entries:
1.  "Like" Reef Botanicals on Facebook and leave a comment letting us know with your Facebook name.
2.  Follow Reef Botanicals on Twitter and tweet this contest.  You can do this once a day for additional entries.  Just leave a comment for each daily tweet and leave a link to your tweet.  Use this tweet:

Win a "For Your Face" Gift Pack from reefbotanicals.com @ReefBotanicals #giveaway at http://dld.bz/zAUW!!

3.  Post about this contest on your Facebook wall and post the link here in a comment.
4.  Add our badge (from the left sidebar) to your blog or website and leave the link in a comment.
5.  Blog about this giveaway and leave a link to your post here in a comment.

GIVEAWAY ENDS ON SUNDAY, OCTOBER 31, AT 5 P.M. EST.

Healing Tea

Not just for candles anymore!

And no, we don't actually claim it heals anything, just that it's awesome.  The name fit because that's what we called our green tea & eucalyptus scented candles, so it made sense to name our green tea and eucalyptus soap Healing Tea to match!

It really is great for your skin, though, with five kinds of oils, including skin-loving olive and almond oils, plus strongly-brewed green tea, cocoa butter, beeswax, and lanolin!  We added in the tea leaves too, for a great speckle and mild exfoliation.

Steal a Kiss!

Ever hear of Thieves' Oil? Neither had I, until just a few months ago.

I have this brilliant and talented friend, Zack.  Zack seems to know an awful lot about a lot of things - he's getting a graduate degree in psychology, is an actor, and makes the most wonderful leatherwork products that he sells.

He's the one who asked for chamomile in our soap and shampoo, which resulted in the reworking of our Lavender Soap and the chamomile present in our Mock Turtle shampoo.

But back to the thieves' oil.  As the story goes, during the bubonic plague in 1413  Europe, there were thieves ransacking the houses of the dead and dying.  Thing is, the plague was incredibly contagious, as I'm sure you remember from your history classes, but for some odd reason... the thieves didn't catch it.

Finally, four of them were captured in France and charged with the thefts.

At the trial, the magistrate offered the thieves leniency if they would reveal how they managed to avoid contracting the dreaded plague despite their close contact with the infected corpses.  The thieves disclosed that they were perfumers and spice traders who had rubbed themselves with a concoction of aromatic herbs.  It worked!

Well, I like this story.  I like this story, and I like the herbs used... cinnamon, clove, eucalyptus, rosemary, and lemon.  So what do I do when I like something!  I make something from it!

This time, I made Thieves' Oil Lip Balm, the fifth balm in the Reef Botanicals line!

Wicked Faire 2010

It was great to have a booth at Wicked Faire this past weekend, tiring as it was.  We got to meet so many people who've been following us, even ones we didn't know about!

And we got to debut so many new things - our Healing Tea soap (made with green tea and eucalyptus essential oil), our facial scrub (made with almond, oatmeal, honey, Bentonite clay, and sweet orange essential oil), and our Heaven Scent salt scrub (made with epsom and dead sea salts, and scented with lavender and rosemary)!

All of these will be available on the site imminently; we just need to rest for a bit after those crazy long days and nights at Faire, and we'll be taking photos and listing them very soon.

Musings

I've no new soap to post about... yet.  No worries, more varieties are on their way.

But in the interim, I have a confession to make.  I cheated on our soap.  No, don't get worried there, I didn't cheat with regard to our soap.  I cheated on our soap.  I used other soap.  I know, I know, how could I?  But... see.. ... I still had other soap in the cabinet when we started making soap!  Was I supposed to waste it?  Well, was I?

I didn't think so either.

So... despite the fact that we have one of each variety (I'm not kidding you here) of our soaps in the dishes in the  bath and one of each in the soap dish on the bathroom sink (This is Eric's doing, I tell you.  Yes, we need to test each batch, but do we really need 17 bars of soap in a single soap dish?  And a duplicate in the bath?), I opened and tried a different soap.

This is a commercial soap, a French soap.  It's very pretty and smells wonderful.  It's got ground almond in it.

Mind you, we also have in our soap dishes our own almond soap.  Why haven't you seen it on our website for sale, you ask?  Because our almond soap was our very first batch of soap ever, and while it's perfectly viable soap and we love to use it, we overheated it, causing it to have properties similar to shale.  When we went to cut it, therefore, we got these funky, irregular shapes.  So we could, theoretically, sell it by the pound as Almond Rock soap in person when you could pick the chunks you want, but we can't in good conscience sell it online when you couldn't see in advance what you were getting and no two people would get the same size/shaped chunks.

So we've got this perfectly good almond soap of our own making in the bath.  It's got crushed almonds in it, some finely ground, some bigger chunks.  I love it.  And yet I opened the commercial version, with all finely ground almond in it.  I guess what happened next serves me right.

I hopped in the shower, and started to wash.  It smelled great, and I was happy.  Now, I tend to scrub with soap.  And I love exfoliating soaps and accessories.  I've used soaps with all sorts of things in them - oatmeal, almond, almond shells... I've used scrubs, facial scrubs, sugar scrubs, salt scrubs.  I'm not afraid of things that are grainy.

This... this was different.  The smoothly molded outer layer wore off in the water, as it should, and I got to the almond.  Or glass shards.  It might've been glass shards.  I jumped and looked down, expecting to see that my skin was gone and blood running into the bathtub drain.  The skin was there, blood was not, and I was glad of that.  But holy crow, what the heck was that?  It was the almonds.  I have no idea what this company did to the almonds, but they were sharp.  They hurt.   It scared me.

Glutton for punishment that I am, I've used the soap again.  I've found that if I put zero pressure, it almost doesn't hurt but still kind of does just from the weight of the bar alone.  Ow!  I'm sad, because I want to like the soap.  This is a $10.00 bar of soap, people!  This is good stuff!  But ow.

And no, I'm not writing this to try and compete with them.  Hell, I'm not even naming them.  And I'm not delusional enough to believe that our teensy weensy business, producing soap batch by batch at our kitchen table in a couple of crock pots is any competition for a huge fancy French soap company.  We're two different species entirely.

But I was really surprised.

On another note, an awesome note, Eric found a very cool soap blog.  This chick rocks.  She's in Florida and she reviews soaps.  At some point, we will send her some soap to review.  But so we've both been reading her blog, and if she was still in Brooklyn, where she's apparently from, Eric and I would be looking to hang out with her.  Her sense of humor, and that of her husband who's posted at least once, is reminiscent of the cakewrecks chick.  And if you don't read Cakewrecks, you should.  Everyone should.  It is funny.  Interestingly, the Cakewrecks chick is also in Florida.

I wonder if they hang out with each other.