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.

The Words of Others

I decided today that I'd share some of the emails and private messages that we've gotten regarding our products.  I won't bother repeating here the messages you can see on the Reef Botanicals Facebook page, since you can just go there to read them, so these are just private messages we've received.

So... here goes...

"The shaving soap is the BOMB.  Been using crappy razors ... and using them way past when they should've been tossed ... and NOT ONE NICK since I started out using that stuff.  Still have to use conditioner even with your shampoo, but my hair is ridiculously thick and coarse.  BUT ... I got my hair colored right before you sent my package.  I only shampoo about once a week because ... it fades my color like CRAZY and I want to keep the red as long as possible.  So I've used your shampoo about 4x now.  I'm used to seeing the water turn a pinky color when I rinse shampoo out ... and with your shampoo?  NO PINK.  NONE.  Not even on the VERY FIRST WASH after the color.  I am AMAZED.  I'm a hairdresser's kid ... I've used only the very 'best stuff' on the market my entire life.  I've been coloring my hair since I was 14 years old.  And that's NEVER EVER happened."

~Lacey, Oklahoma

"I've been using [Reef Botanicals] shampoo since March.  Still use conditioner and I think that's because it's colored 'cause my hair is fine and short, but I just love it.  Will never go back to anything else and I'm an ex-hairdresser.

On another note I just started using Purity for cleaning [face painting] sponges and man does it rock.  If you aren't using it on your sponges you are surely missing out.  It's great."

~Nora, Texas

"I really do like the Purity.  The dry skin I was having issues with on my hands and the other spots like elbows and feet, has completely eased off.  It works great on our hair too - no tangles!"

"Both mom and I are using Purity soap for our hair.  I don't need to use conditioner either, if I use shampoo I HAVE to use conditioner to get a comb through my short hair!  Works great for us."

~Shannon, Canada

"I got a grease stain on the front of a favorite t-shirt months ago.  Washed it and washed it, pre-soaked it, tried a couple different cleaning sprays, nothing worked.  So I relegated it to wearing around the house.  When I got home from my last gig, the Purity did such a good job on my sponges and brushes that I got to thinking.  What about my t-shirt?  I pulled it out of the laundry basket, wet the bar of soap, and gave the stain a good rubbing.  I let it sit overnight and then washed it in hot water with my regular detergent the next day.  Ta da!  Stain's gone and I get to wear my shirt in public again.

All hail Larissa, Goddess of Clean!"

~Nancy, Virginia

"My order of soaps arrived yesterday.  Thank you for such great service.

As I told you, I was hesitant to try any kind of soap on my face because my skin is so dry and the climate here only adds to it.  Well, I tried the oatmeal honey soap on my face last night and WOW, it was fantastic.  My skin was actually softer afterwards and not dry at all!  I am delighted.  Why don't all soap manufacturers leave out the drying crap?  This is wonderful and I am sold."

~Joan, Arizona

"So, since I spent the whole day decluttering stuff ... I decided to reward myself with a nice, long warm bath scented with  my favorite oils, and finished with [Reef Botanical]'s sham-soap and lemon-sugar scrub.  I SMELL SO GOOD, and I FEEL SO GOOD!  My skin is like velvet.  :)"

~Cindy, Minnesota

"Just wanted to let you know I received my soap and I love it.

The packaging was very nice.  The Cool as a Cuke is my favorite.  Very nice lather, almost no fragrance, and it leaves my hands really soft.  Cleans up the face paint REALLY well on my fingers.  The lavender is nice too, but doesn't seem to lather as well. ... still, very nice and perfect for my guest bath.

I'm sure myself and my family will purchase more.  We love homemade products that are part of the solution for this Earth AND are made by small Mom and Pop businesses here in the USA.  You and Eric have done well.

~Laurie, California

"Today was my husband's birthday and I gave him the shaving products I bought from you.  He loves them, especially the soap!  He says it's the best lathering soap he's ever had, and he's had some expensive stuff before.  Just wanted to let you know.  I'm sure I'll be ordering again!"

~Teresa, North Carolina

A Note

We've got a new batch of our Oatmeal Honey soap on the rack, ready to go.  You'll notice, though, if you order it, that it doesn't look exactly like it does on the website (we'll be taking new photos).  That's because in the batch on the website, we used too much honey.  It didn't affect the soap's viability at all, didn't make it any less cleansing, didn't hurt anything.  But it made the soap a very dark brown and gave it a honey-colored lather that actually concerned some people.

This batch is done properly, which means it's a pale honey color with awesome tan specks in it.  Very, very pretty.  It smells amazing, and works great too.  In essence, except in the fact that it looks better, it's no different from the Reef Botanicals Oatmeal Honey soap you know and love.

And since I don't have any photos of the pretty soap yet, here are some more flowers, just to give you something else that's pretty to look at.  These are from around our neighborhood.

Happy Summer!

My Face

This is me.

Pretty cute, right?  Sorry, had to throw that in there.  Hehe.

As a kid, I had pretty decent skin, even through my teen years. I got lucky.  Sure, once a month or so, I was likely to break out a bit, but for me, "breaking out" meant a bit of an issue on my chin or nose.  Once I hit my 30s, though, my skin changed, much to my dismay.  I'm more prone to a mild rosacea, especially when I'm stressed.  And I'm more prone to dry patches here and there and the occasional breakout.  Still in limited areas, still not a huge deal, but annoying to me.  Like a lot of women, after all, I'm my own worst critic and have a tendency to sometimes examine every millimeter of my face in my light-up magnifying makeup mirror.

Yeah, I'm nuts like that.  You know you are too.  Admit it.

Well, the other day, Eric looked at me and said, "Your face looks better."  And it does.  I noticed it too.  Me, the critic.

What's the difference?

I've been alternating, depending on my whim, between using Purity and Oatmeal Honey as a facial soap, rather than my old fancy facial cleanser (the one that is $32 for 8.3 oz and contains both sulfates and parabens, harsh and potentially harmful chemicals I definitely neither want nor need).  Hm...

Oh, and when I'm not using Purity or Oatmeal Honey, I'm saving time by washing my face in the shower... with my favorite Mock Turtle shampoo bar!  Reef Botanicals shampoo, you see, is just as healthy and harmless as the soap; it's just formulated to be more lathery and have extra hair-healthy ingredients.  That way, it's just as good as any of the other soap for skin, but even more healthy for hair.

With cocoa butter, chamomile, tea tree oil, eucalyptus, sea kelp, and honey, it's bound to be great for both hair and skin.

In fact, we have some customers who save time in the shower by just using their favorite Reef Botanicals shampoo from head to toe!

As for me, I'm curious to see the progress on my own face.  I'll keep you posted.

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.

Something New

While we wait for our last very interesting batch of soap to cure - and I really can't wait to unmold it to see what it looks and smells like, since there's ginger involved! - Eric and I decided to try something new tonight.

It's a success, I think.

We have made our very first sugar scrub!  It's brown sugar and oils, together with cocoa and some other spices to make it smell just heavenly!  (So it's vegan-friendly.)

It'll be debuted this Sunday at Halloween in December, a fundraiser for the family of Isaac Bonewits, a noted author and teacher who is fighting cancer and as a result has a lot of bills to pay.  Eric and I would have been attending anyway, but now we're donating a gift basket to the fundraiser's silent auction.  Plus, we'll be vending, selling our products and donating a portion of the proceeds back to the fundraiser as well.

Please note that the container in the photo is the one that will be used for this initial batch of sugar scrubs only; it will not be the jar that will appear on the website.  This is a glass container, and because we are concerned for your safety in the bath, future scrubs will be available in a clear plastic jar with a white lid.

Eric and I both tested the scrub tonight, and then washed our hands with our Oatmeal Honey soap.  Even after washing, our hands were notably moisturized and softer.  We're so excited that it worked!

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.

A Clean Endeavor

I am Larissa, doing business with my husband Eric as Reef Botanicals, making high quality natural soaps. We knew we were right for each other early on, but didn't even realize until after we married in March of 2009 that we both loved to make things from scratch.

It was only natural for us to combine our talents for art, craft, and recipe development and step into the arts of candle and soap making.

We've got four recipe varieties so far:

Fudge Chunk contains Ghirardelli cocoa powder and has a subtle chocolate scent.

The Oatmeal Honey is made with precisely those ingredients, and smells amazing! We have it in both bath bar and hand soap size.

The Honey Chocolate is similar, but made with premium crushed cacao nibs, giving it a slight chocolate smell and exfoliating properties.

And our Lemongrass & Sage soap is made with lemongrass essential oil and dried sage. It has a great lather and an amazing citrus scent that wakes me up in the morning.

All of the soaps are made with all natural ingredients, nothing synthetic. Many of our soaps are also vegetarian or vegan-friendly. Those are noted in the descriptions.


Today, we're planning a coffee soap with fresh-brewed coffee and coffee grinds for exfoliation.

Each bar comes packaged in a beautiful organza bag, tied with a ribbon. They're perfect for gifts or to spoil yourself.

We're having a blast! Feel free to visit the site, email us with questions, and place an order.