What the heck is Lavandin?

Lavender Plant

When looking at ingredients on a natural product that uses essential oils you may see lavandin listed either with lavender or without. It is an essential oil that is similar to lavender with many of the same qualities. Lavandin (Lavandula x intermedia) is actually a hybrid created from true lavender (lavendula augustifolia) and spike lavender (Lavendula latifolia). The true lavender grows higher in the mountains while the spike lavender or aspic as it is sometimes known grows down lower. Where they tended to meet they would cross pollinate and lavandin came into being.

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How Our Use of Rice Bran oil benefits you.

When I first started making soap back around 1998 I used olive oil. I liked olive oil in my soap and it was a widely used, highly regarded oil in soap making circles. Then about 5 or 6 years ago when olive oil prices started going through the roof I began looking for an alternative to olive oil and found it with rice bran oil. Rice Bran oil is considered by some to be the “worlds healthiest edible oil” containing vitamins, antioxidants, nutrients and is trans fat free. Studies have shown it can help lower cholesterol, enhance the immune system and fight free radicals.

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Geranium Essential Oil – Why I think it’s so great!

Egyptian Rose and Sweet Orange Natural Soap Bars

Geranium has a great, floral scent and is one of the few floral scents in essential oils that are reasonably priced enough to work with for soaps. Geranium is also is useful for many medical and skincare applications as well as strongly impacting your emotions.

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Keep your cool with Peppermint Essential Oil

Good Morning Mint Soap Bars

As we head into the dog days of August keeping cool is definitely on many of our minds. Peppermint essential oil (mentha piperita), indeed all of the mint essential oils can help you achieve that goal. In many ways it can be as refreshing as a dip in the pool.

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Susan’s Soaps & More website has a new look!

First I attended the HSCG convention a few weeks ago. I knew I wanted to learn more about improving our online presence so I attended just about every seminar they offered on anything to do with that topic. There were some great presentations and I learned something from all of them. Then I decided that I definitely needed to make a major change with our website and it needed to be done soon. If it wasn’t going to be done now then we would be into the State Fair and after that Christmas and next year the FWSSR and by then almost another year has gone by. So here we are and now it is launch time. I am sure that there will be some glitches but hopefully, the overall experience will be better for you. Some of the things that I wanted to achieve were: Faster page load times. Overall I believe the site is loading faster, but probably still more tweaking needs to be done.Have a homepage with smaller graphics you can see more quickly what’s important. Ability to provide product reviews so you can both read and voice opinions of our products.The ability to update my site…

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Happy Memorial Day

It has been a busy few weeks.  Jerry and I went on vacation to Scottsdale and then the Grand Canyon for a few days. We flew back home on Sunday, May 12th Mother’s Day.  Monday was busy with orders and then since it was my birthday we went out for dinner that night.  By Wednesday I was down with a 24 hour stomach bug and then early, early Friday morning it was off to the HSCG conference here in Grapevine.  It was a great conference and I learned a lot.  One of my main take aways was that I need to get serious about switching my website to a new ecommerce platform.  I think I have found a platform but it is going to take a lot of work and time. In the meantime we do have some more products back in stock like our Cinnamon Spice Soap. Cinnamon Spice Soap Till the next post, Susan

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