Artful Teasing

Perfume and Fragrance Blogs and Websites

2011-02-16T01:16:00.000-08:00

It seems a bit pedantic blogging about blogs but I have been immersed in some very good blogs and websites about all things olafactory lately. Here are two of my favourites -

I must say I find it difficult articulating fragrances - they are so personal and empathetic. But Bois de Jamine is very very good this is from her blog:

"About Victoria, the Editor and WriterI grew up in a family of chemical engineers, and while my early background has revolved more around aldehydes themselves rather than Chanel No. 5, my interest in chemistry shaped my passion for perfumery. I have been collecting and studying essential oils and synthetic materials for several years. At the same time, this quest has led to a fascination with the history of perfumery, resulting in a large library of vintage fragrances.
In May of 2005, while working on my Ph.D., I decided to create a website that would offer a tribute to everything I find fascinating about perfume: the people who are responsible for creating fragrances; the materials that are woven into accords and then into the resulting compositions; and the very essence of the process that leads to the finished composition. While the perfume writing started as a hobby, it quickly turned into a full-time job, which has been very rewarding. Besides Bois de Jasmin, my writing appeared on the pages of Perfumer and Flavorist Magazine and Financial Times Magazine How to Spend It."

So inspiring to read the comments of such a knowledgeable person.

My other aweinspringwebsite is White Lotus Aromatics such in depth first hand knowledge and historical/cultural references is something to be celebrated. I have always wanted to explore the north west coast of the USA and Canada and Christopher and Suzanne have definately encouraged to make a visit. This is from their blog:
"White Lotus Aromatics is located in beautiful Port Angeles, WA "where the mountains greet the sea."

White Lotus evolved as a natural adjunct to the Fragrant Harvest Project, which commenced in India in 1996. Since then Christopher has made numerous trips to India, traveling throughout the country to meet with farmers, distillers and extractors,and research scientists working on aromatic crops and their natural distillates and extraction. These journeys paved the way for offering pure essential oils, CO2 extracts, traditional attars, absolutes, carrier oils and, most recently, incense to the fragrance community. The hunt for the highest quality oils led naturally to expanding our interactions with distilleries and extraction units to countries outside of India and now we are directly procuring natural essences from Bulgaria, Madagascar, South Africa, Ethiopia, Hungary, France, Italy, Bosnia and several other countries.

We focus our attention on a select number of organic and wild harvested essential oils, hydrodistilled essences, CO2 extracts, attars, ruhs, and absolutes.We have done our best to select only the highest quality, purest oils available from our distilling and extracting colleagues around the world and hope that our customers, old and new, will find in our aromatic palette precious essences that will serve their needs.

Suzanne and Christopher McMahon handle all the operations of White Lotus Aromatics--sourcing, ordering, invoicing, packing. Managing the business ourselves allows us to maintain a direct relationship with our customers while moving forward with the creative projects the interest and inspire us."

Best of 2010

2011-01-19T01:25:00.000-08:00

Its official - our Sweet Orange, Geranium and Frankincense natural fragrance blend is our customers' favourite. Not only in our shop but with our business customers including the Goodwood Members' Club, Glorious Goodwood, Mr Underhill's Michelin starred restaurant with rooms in Ludlow and the Griffin Inn in Fletching, East Sussex.
All three essential oils are now certified organic, ensuring high quality and best practice towards the producers. Our Sweet Orange Oil is rare orange oil made from the rind of Shamouti oranges - quite difficult to source but well worth it as it has a much deeper, spicier fragrance than more available oils. This combines beautifully with our Frankincense oil gathered and processed by nomads in Somalia.

The National Trust

2011-01-03T02:39:00.000-08:00

We are very pleased that Artful Teasing products our now available in National Trust Shops in the South East.
Currently we are in the gift shops in Petworth House, Polesden Lacey, Nymans Gardens, Batemans, Alfriston Clergy House, Canterbury, Morden Hall and Chichester. It is very satisfying to know that the sales of our lotions and potions are helping to maintain such lovely properties.

The entrance to Petworth House from the town

Second Place in Christmas Live Window Competition

2011-01-03T02:27:00.000-08:00

Huarrah, my lovely mermaid delighted the judges winning us second place in Petworth's Christmas Live Window competition. It is becoming a bit of a tradition in Petworth on the first Saturday of December that retailers have live people or animals in their windows. It's great fun and I was surprised to get a place as the competition in fierce. My cheeky friend Julie just loved stopping the traffic and waving to passers by. Thank you Julie, and thanks to Becky at Twenty (a fantastic designer boutique round the corner) who gave me the idea. Needless to say, she came first with her beautiful ballerina.

Cinnamon Oil

2010-07-28T05:52:00.000-07:00

I don't tend to use a lot of cinnamon oil in my essential oil blends, it is incredibly strong and can be overpowering and irritating. But I do use it for Christmas candles along with orange, clove and nutmeg.
Cinnamon is a small tree that grows mainly in Indonesia, Sri Lanka and China. We use the the inner bark rolled into quills for cooking and you can obtain essentil oil from it. But you can also use the leaves to produce cinnamon leaf oil.
One cosmetic use of cinnamon oil is in lip plumping products. The oil irritates the lips making them swell slightly so that you think the product is doing something!

Petworth Festival

2010-07-23T04:27:00.000-07:00

It's this time of year again. Wonderful artists from all over the world come to our little town to give concerts in St Mary's Church or Bignor Park. This year one of the events will be in Petworth House. In fact I'm going to see it this evening.
I somehow managed to get 'highly commended' in the window competition with the theme of world music. I got one of my kimono dressing gowns to play a chinese flute and made fans and bright pink flowers out of tissue paper. You can see me being presented with a bottle of Nyetimber champagne here - page 2, ninth picture along. The eighth picture is of Niki and Jackie outside Tiffins Tea Room. They won the competition with a very clever Teddy and the Tempests spoof about a group of teddies on a world tour (The Tempest is one of the Festival treats this year). The seventh photo is of John Bird outside his antique shop. He came second with his vuvuzela playing statue in a musical bikini!
The Festival opened with a free open air concert at the end of the annual Fete in the Park. As usual it was heralded around the by our town crier Mike Hubbard.

Veuve Clicquot Gold Cup

2010-07-21T02:53:00.001-07:00

On Sunday 18th July we took our products to the final of the Veuve Clicquot Polo Gold Cup at Cowdray, Midhurst. We wanted to promote the shop and the website and so gave out lots of free hotel-size samples of bath & shower gel and body lotion. We had a great time seeing the reactions of people to the essential oil fragrances; sweet orange, geranium and frankincense was the favourite followed by pink grapefruit, geranium and lemongrass. We had a prize draw for a hamper of our products worth £100 and handed out our new pull out 'peel and reveal' card which has two perfume strips to smell.

We managed to take it in turns to look at the polo which is very exciting and very dangerous! I love looking at beautiful thoroughbred horses but am a bit reticent about how they are used in racing and polo. However I suppose they would not exist if these sports did not support them.

One of my favourite paintings is Whistlejacket by Stubbs. I don't know why I love horses so much as I am terrified at the thought of riding them or crossing a field with them in!
http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/george-stubbs-whistlejacket

Cooks' Hand Wash

2009-08-09T08:42:00.000-07:00

I love cooking but hate having smelly hands after chopping garlic and onions. So I have created a new essential oil blend: Sicilian Lemon, Fennel & Peppermint, to put in our hand wash. I have also sourced these lovely 500ml aluminium bottles which look great in the kitchen. The label is a special heavy duty matt silver one which is impervious to water and grease, so it is perfect to stand by the kitchen sink.

2009-08-05T00:26:00.000-07:00

The kind people at Montezuma's, our local organic chocolate producer, are letting me put a small bar of chocolate in a gift box with a jar of our organic chocolate moisture mousse and a chocolate votif.

Montezuma's is based in near Chichester, a twenty minute drive from Petworth http://www.montezumas.co.uk .

I am not at all sure how I am going to cope with having bars and bars of chocolate surrounding me in the run up to Christmas!

2009-08-03T01:21:00.000-07:00

My lovely customers, Babes With Babies, have asked me to create two hand lotion and hand wash sets: Happy Hands organic lavender and Cleanse and Care pink grapefruit, geranium and lemongrass. It's so long since my children were babies that I forgot how often a new mum has to wash their hands. Lavender is perfect as it contains natural anti-bacterial properties and is great for soothing and healing. The citrus zing of the Cleanse and Care set is great for tired mums.

Our hand wash is made from plant derived cleansing and foaming ingredients which are very gentle and do not dry out the skin and our lotion contains organic shea butter and olive oil to moisturise and protect the skin from anti-oxidants.

I love working with Babes With Babies, they always appreciate the work involved in creating bespoke labels and always come up with inventive ideas for product names and gift sets.

Petworth Festival Window Competition

2009-07-28T11:25:00.001-07:00

The Petworth Festival has sponsored a window competition for all the shops in Petworth. I made a linen night shirt play the french horn, but unfortunately this was not enought to win.

Petworth has the most amazingly inventive shopkeepers who have a brilliant sense of humour. I am always striving for the perfectly beautiful window, where my colleagues just know what will tickle a judge's fancy.

The winner was Guilt Lingerie. Georgina created two fantastic windows using the music 'Ain't Misbehaving' and 'Air on a G String'. Last year she put the front have of a Morris Traveller in the window during the Goodwood Revival festival.

Second place went to Tiffins Tea Room. Nicki and Jackie used tea cups as musical notes. They always theme their windows according to local events.

So I am planning my Christmas window well in advance and hoping my lovely colleagues run out of ideas!

Pink grapefruit can make you look younger!

2009-07-06T00:28:00.000-07:00

Our pink grapefruit, geranium and lemongrass lotions and washes have been best sellers this past week. The refreshing fragrance has been a hit in the hot weather.

I have just found out that the person who did a study on Pink Grapefruit that suggested the fragrance made women appear six years younger has taken a patent out on it.

The inventor is Dr. Alan Hirsch, director of the Smell and Taste Treatment ath the Research Foundation in Chicago.

His study showed that middle aged models wearing pink grapefruit were thought by men to be six years younger than their actual age.

Other scents were tried but had no effect including broccoli, pumpkin pie, banana, cucumbers and spearmint leaves!

It doesn't work the other way around. There was no effect on a woman's perception of a man's age. We can't be so easily fooled.

Try out the theory with our pink grapefruit, geranium and lemongrass products. They smell wonderful - a citrus, zesty and zingy- so they will make you feel better even if you don't apperar to look younger.

Lavender, my favourite essential oil

2009-07-02T23:34:00.000-07:00

A Petworth resident brought in this lovely bunch of lavender yesterday. I wanted to photograph it before I hang it up to dry and it loses it's vibrant colour. Unfortunately this type of lavender is unscented and not used to make my favourite of all essential oils.

I love lavender, not just because it smells so wonderfully soothing and uplifting, but because it is probably the most useful of essential oils. Unlike many others there is good scientific proof that it has real benefits for the skin and the body. You can read about the proven benefits of lavender oil in our Lavender e-book.

One of my customers came bought a jar of our lavender cream for her daughter who is a professional violinist. She was suffering from excema-like symptoms on her hands. She has recently reported that the cream did the trick. We have many customers who buy our lavender oil to help them sleep. It's really good when we we get such good feedback.

There is much anecdotal evidence saying that lavender is very good for healing burns so when my son, who hasn't experienced sun-burn (or indeed sun) for many years went to the beach this week and came back like a lobster I applied our lavender and rose geranium lotion liberally. Hopefully the lavender will soothe his burnt skin and the organic shea butter and olive oil in the lotion will help prevent peeling.

The lavender oil we use in our products is organic and from Provence in the south of France. It is extremely versatile and blends well with many other oils. Some of my favourite combinations are:

lavender and rose geranium
lavender, tea tree and patchouli
lavender, lemongrass, peppermint and tea tree
lavender and rosemary.

It is also very 'well-behaved' ulike our organic rose geranium oil which needs to be added with care or it will 'curdle' our lovely body and hand wash base. So all-in-all I can't praise lavender oil highly enough.

The Benefits of Shea Butter

2009-06-30T00:03:00.000-07:00

Thirty percent of the body's vitamin E is found in the skin. This is because it is an anti-oxidant and the skin is the part of the body that is most exposed to oxygen.
Why is this important? Well, oxygen is very reactive
and if it is left unchecked it will break down the skin's tissues leading to premature aging.

Vitamin E prevents this by absorbing the oxygen itself and so protecting the more vulnerable tissues. There are 4 different forms of vitamin E - each one
suited to a particular type of environment in the skin.

Natural sources of vitamin E are also made up of this range of slightly different forms of vitamin E, whereas synthetic vitamin E used in a lot of skin creams and vitamin supplements tends to only be in one form.

One of the richest sources of vitamin E is shea butter. All our lotions and creams contain it and we have written a Shea Butter E- Book which gives a lot more detailed information about the wonderful properties and benefits of this natural moisturising ingredient. Our shea butter is organic and is collected by a community of women in Ghana so you can benefit your skin and rural families.

New range of organic damask rose skin care

2009-06-27T02:44:00.000-07:00

I am finalising our new range of organic damask rose products - cream, balm, body oil and rose water.
I have sourced organic rose oil and rose water from Bulgaria. This single source of roses is grown by the Nikolaev family. Apparantly the communist regime confiscated land which was left overgrown and was only returned about 10 years ago.

True rose oil is a complex combination of tea-like heart and base notes with floral overtones; quite different to the synthetic fragrances we are all used to. It is very soothing and excellent for dry and mature skin.

To make rose oil you have to pick the rose petals early in the morning before the sun drives away the precious fragrance. The petals are distilled and the oil separated from the water which becomes rose water. Rose water retains some of the rose oil. Our rose water is strongly fragranced showing that it contains a good quantity of oil.

Rose oil, or rose otto as it is called, contains retinol which has anti-wrinkle properties. Our rose cream can be used on the face, neck and decollete.

New Essential Oil Blends

2009-05-31T03:40:00.000-07:00

I have been busy creating three new uni-sex essential oil blends to add a bit of spice!

Italian Bergamot, Cardamom and Pepper

Pink Grapefruit, Juniper and Cedarwood

Sweet Basil, Lemon and Vetiver

Bergamot, Cardamom and Pepper has a delightful orangey, sunny top note followed by the spicy pepper (from green peppercorns for a more subtle fragrance) and the exotic cardamom.

My second blend had Pink Grapefruit giving it a rounded fresh, zingy fragrance with the clean, haunting smell for Juniper and a musky Cedarwood to follow. I prefer Pink Grapefruit ordinary Grapefruit as it is more fruity and less harsh.

Finally I just love the uplifting fragrance of Sweet Basil, not to everyone's taste but I can't get enough of it. It blends beautifully with lemon; fresh and clean. Vetiver adds a subtle base note.

With smart, new silver and black labels these blends should prove popular with both sexes.

Organic Chocolate Moisture Mousse

2009-04-26T05:55:00.000-07:00

Despite initial scepticism, I am now in love with my new Organic Chocolate Moisture Mousse. I wasn't at all convinced that putting chocolate on your skin is anything more than a gimmic. However cocoa apparantly contains anti-oxidants, more in fact than green tea or red wine. Anti-oxidants protect the skin from the aging effect of free radicals caused by sunlight.

Inika Mineral Cosmetics

2009-03-10T05:56:00.000-07:00

I decided to stock Inika Mineral Cosmetics in my shop and they have proved extremely popular. The colours are stunning and the foundation is remarkable. I especially like the mascara. The best thing about them is that they are completely natural.

www.inikacosmetics.co.uk

Mineral Cosmetics

2008-08-03T01:31:00.000-07:00

I have been researching the many brands of natural and mineral cosmetics available with the view to selling a range in my shop. I must say I was rather sceptical about putting raw crushed rocks on your face without any cream-like base to smooth them on. I also like my products to work beautifully and feel luxurious which sometimes means they cannot be completely natural.

After many hours googling I finally found a mineral cosmetic range that ticked all my boxes - attractive packaging, good website,vibrant colours, a proper lipstick (not just rock pigment but in a creamy base) and most importantly clear instructions on how to become a stockist.

It is an Australian company and all the pigments are from rocks found in Australia. All products including the lipstick are completely natural. I won't mention the name as I am still evaluating them.

I now have some samples and was pleasantly surprised by the efficacy of the foundation which comes in several shades. You simply brush the pigment onto your skin using downward strokes. I also dabbed the minerals onto blemishes with my finger which worked very well. The best thing about the foundation is that you don't feel like you've got anything on your skin which for someone who won't go out of the front door without make-up is quite a liberating feel. I have also tried mixing the foundation pigment in our face cream and this also gave good coverage.

I found the eyeshadows quite difficult to apply until my daughter suggested using a wet cotton bud. This made the colours much more irridescent and stopped the pigment from landing where you don't want it. I wasn't given a set of brushes to apply the pigments so I will definately need to get some to see if it is any easier with a proper brush. Unfortunately I wasn't sent a lipstick or blusher so I am going to get some of those before I decide to stock them.

So although I need to do some more research I may well be a convert. The lipstick will be the decider!

End of Term Pressie Rush

2008-07-03T00:36:00.001-07:00

It's that time of year again when harrassed parents need to find gifts for their childrens' teachers, teaching assistants, matrons etc. etc. I sometimes worry that one poor teacher will end up with exactly the same present from each of her pupils.

As an ex-teacher I know how nice it is to be appreciated and I really enjoy making beautifully wrapped gifts to make people feel special.

Gift buying can be stressful especially if you don't want it to be a token present. So I spend a lot of my time dreaming up different gift ideas and how they are going to packaged. Good packaging is often the most expensive and time-consuming part of creating a brand.

Luckily, as a small manufacturer, I can try out different ideas in my shop and online to see what appeals. Men are attracted to different styles of packaging to women and are always grateful if they don't have to wrap it.

With online shopping you don't even have to post it yourself, that's my job!

Six months to Christmas

2008-06-27T07:01:00.000-07:00

Its six months to Christmas and seems I am already too late! The lovely on-line home of independent shops and producers like myself, http://www.notonthehighstreet.com/ is sending out Christmas stockings and press releases to magazines and newspapers already and I still haven't got my photos sorted let alone finalised all my gift offerings.

But my beautiful Artful Teasing labelled gift boxes have finally arrived and so I can get going at last. I've had them custom made to fit my personalised bath oils and natural soy wax candles but I am sure I can think of a few other things to put in them.

Merry Christmas!!!

Trade Mark Dilemma

2008-06-25T07:32:00.000-07:00

I've wanted to start a new brand for some time. My customers love the pure essential oils I use to fragrance my products but I'm afraid you just can't get essential oils from some of our most popular plants. Take bluebell for instance, you can get a hyacinth absolute which is a wonderful heady perfume, but it has a heavy, earthy base note which dominates over time. Not at all like my gorgeous Woodland Bluebell fragrance with it's wonderful green freshness.

So I want to keep using my beautiful floral fragrances that my customers love so much but which don't really fit into the Artful Teasing ethos which is grounded in the use of natural oils. Hence the need for a new brand name.

My fantastic graphic designer, Janice, suggested 'From the Garden' which we I thought was great; floral fragrances inspired by our magnificent Sussex gardens especially for you or a loved one. I did the searches - nothing on google, hurrah! The web address was free - even better. But my husband (in his infinite wisdom) did a Trade Mark search - disappointment. It has been registered by a well known soap manufacturer from the USA.

Apparently companies spend thousands of pounds registering catchy sounding phrases which they might never use. Oh well, back to the drawing board..... So I am going to call my floral fragrance brand 'A Garden So Lovely' and have 'from the garden' as a tag line. A comprimise but I can live with it.

So bluebell, lily of the valley, gillyflower ........ you can be in my lotions and potions 'from a garden' called 'a garden so lovely'.