It’s interesting that the oldies truly are goldies, and simplicity is the key in terms of caring for your skin naturally.
Exfoliation is one example- no-one knew that term until the cosmetic giants invented it and marketed something to consumers to do it with!
In the old days, a rough towel/face flannel ( known in Aus as a face washer) performed that task without anyone knowing what the action was called;it just gave you a glowing shiny face and felt good!
The benefits of exfoliating the skin are manyfold but principally, when you remove the layer of dulling dry flaky dead skin cells mechanically, by gently using our Seaweed Honey and Herb Polishing Scrub or  the fabulous German Riffi Beauty Care Mitt, your skin instantly looks more vibrant and feels smoother,encourages blood circulation and hence healthy skin cell growth, discourages the formulation of skin impurities such as black / whiteheads as the action also removes debris/sebum , unblocking pores before these have time to form, and, if present, gently coaxes them loose without destructive squeezing which can scar the skin.

Feedback tells us that spotty oily acne prone skin- indeed dry skin- is improved massively by regular exfoliation, and it is so simple!

Best bit is that your moisture cream is absorbed better and hence is FAR more effective-YAY, what’s not to like?

As I’ve detailed before, when I was growing up in the 60′s,we had no truck with anything but basic soap and water, and homemade remedies from the herb garden for healing and soothing the skin which worked a treat.
Interestingly, my grandmother passed on to me her love of oatmeal,both inside (starting the day with porridge -still hooked on that creamy, steaming goo!) and out- she used oatmeal as face powder and cleanser when young.

But there is much more to it than just breakfast,so when I began formulating my own products for my own use, and later for sale, oatmeal was the start point to build a great product, with the addition of almond meal ( vitamin rich) Tasmanian seaweed and other herbal goodies.

An excellent multi-purpose skin cleanser, it provides very gentle cleansing exfoliation, leaving skin smooth, soft, and clean, helps to relieve dryness, is naturally moisturising which helps to  heal minor irritations and soothe redness.

Our scrub makes a great soothing, deep cleansing facepack too!

My grandmother also used to add soothing oatmeal to my bathwater, to relieve  the itching of my childhood eczema- using an old sock filled with oatmeal ( left hanging under the tap whilst water running) and squeezed out the milky goodness into the water.

I discovered as I grow older that the towel trick is not enough, that exfoliating regularly is really necessary for healthy glowing skin.

Have a look at our web special at the moment where you can try our Riffi mitts at up to half price!

There is apparently an old Australian ad with the catchphrase”Oils ain’t oils” used to sell a particular brand of engine oil I gather, whose general point I would imagine ( not having seen it, being a Brit) was that not all oils function the same, or indeed are of the same quality.

How true that is when you look at the criminal deception perpetrated on the female population in terms of the cosmetic creams made by multinationals….at least 99% of the product is bulldust and the rest is (free)water!!

Perhaps I should recap…I started this business because I had really bad eczema, and was in a sales job with a lot of exposure to the public which was really mortifying with red, sore incredibly sensitive dry skin, so I tried every product on the planet to fix it.

Unfortunately, all of them without exception made the condition worse, because the synthetic scents, mineral oil  and (possibly)toxic paraben preservatives( derived from petroleum) made my skin break out, sore and red  and the lack of any real substance ( good natural plant oils) in them offered no protection whatsoever left on my skin to keep my skin’s own moisture in.

The anatomy of a commercially made, profit focussed moisture cream is very  simple- pump in as much water, suspended in the cheapest fats available ( in the past mineral oil,  but now mostly chemically derived emulsifiers) designed to hold as much water as possible ( “oil in water formulas”lots of water with a small amount of cheap oil …water is free) and offer a cream that is “easily absorbed ” which is what consumers have been led to believe happens.

In fact as you spread this water based confection onto your skin, the water evaporates and leaves nothing of any value behind( no good quality waxes are used because that pushes up production costs and decreases profits) to actually “absorb” but as the cream has seemingly disappeared …voila! Another trick!

Indeed your skin dries out nicely with every application, you use more and buy more…great for the manufacturer/brand!

I personally think that this is criminal- a double whammy rip-off for consumers-because the poor consumer, exhorted to buy the product by multi million dollar ad budgets in the media, gets a hugely overpriced product that simply does nothing but-often- irritate the skin and dry it our further!

What I was seeking was a thick, rich, luscious ( 100% natural, truly chemical free moisture cream) that would remain on the skin for 12 hours or more, and really do its job, but more REALLY soothe and leave all the good stuff in it behind on your skin to genuinely protect it, and stop moisture loss …oh, and fix my poor eczema and dry skin!

To do this, I discovered, I needed to make my own, based on the superb quality that I wanted, that simply is not available commercially,not based on cost.

So I returned to my grandmother’s old beeswax ( leaves a microfine protective, moisture trapping film on the skin)and honey ( moisturising, soothing, draws moisture to the skin) super rich formulae which are quite the opposite to commercial creams- water in oil, which means a lot of skin friendly easily absorbed super fine plant oils- and REALLY work – the incredible feedback we get on the independant review site WOWMOW says it all.

We also used fabulous old staple, used for thousands of years, superb extra virgin olive oil and of course our signature healing herb Calendula,that grows wild in almost every garden, and was my Grnadmother’s favourite skin herb.

Within weeks my skin was healed, moist and dry skin was history….and this is the feedback we get time and again from clients.

BUT, this of course presented a dilemma when attempting to make the product for sale,because all these ingredients cost FAR more than water and petroleum based ingredients, hence our products cost more, but you, our clients agree that they are well worth it, and indeed incredible value for money- take a look at the excellent external site  WOWMOW which offers independant reviews of businesses posted by happy customers, it appears that we are not the only ones who-rather immodestly perhaps-think that we are doing a great job.

Read for yourself what they think, and please add your own thoughts should you wish to, we love reading it, makes us feel good, and tells others that we don’t tell porkies like all the rest!

Essentially we are making a handmade, “homemade” quality ( mum’s yummy cake with butter instead of the cheap supermarket cake with margarine or trans fats, if you will) just like all the artisan growers and makers at the now widespread Farmer’s Markets…and that is why quality costs money!

I remember that one client once said “If your skincare were food it would be caviar!”

It is very gratitying to see such great product feedback and reviews because unlike commercial multinationals,we cannot spend multi millions of dollars on promoting an illusion..  we  reinvest all of our revenue in the quality of the products, paying Australian staff , supporting our local suppliers,and quality  ingredients, all of which you can see and feel in our products.

Now winter is upon us ( and the snow is down to the 700 metre mark on the mountain in Hobart today) it is even more important to have a super rich protective cream to knock the dry skin ( face and hands)on the head this chilly season, so we have a great cream special on -buy one cream get a second ( of equal or lesser value) at HALF PRICE!  Enjoy!!

I love Bali…having been there about 6 times in the past 20 years- it used to be on the way to and from the UK when it was a regular stopover for the major airlines, pre-Bali Bombing-I have always admired the beauty and positive nature of the people.
It is very interesting how- despite the massive onslaught of tourism- their Hindu-Animist culture survives and even thrives, beyond the gamelan driven tourist shows, in a deeply superstitious and ritual bound society…a ritual for everything performed with grace and beauty, from the delicate woven offerings with rice and tropical flowers to the seemingly endless full on colour and noise temple ceremonies.
The people are gentle, positive and and friendly, and their island paradise green and beautiful too- but lately the bulldozers and rapacious building are starting to nibble away at the very thing that visitors come to see…the tranquillity shattered by jackhammers and building traffic.
There is still beauty to be found though if you move into the deep countryside, with delightful snapshot moments of ducks in a row being herded through the fluorescent green lush rice paddies, and of course the myriad iridescent rainbows of dragonflies.
It is interesting and very sad to see that there is a flip side to this postcard of paradise though, in the appalling abuse and malreatment of the mentally ill who are often chained in isolation by their relatives very simply, not out of deliberate cruelty, but simply having no medical options available to treat them.
I watched an SBS television documentary on this recently ,I have to say it broke my heart to see this,and I resolved to try and help in some way, primarily by supporting those to care enough to be active, and DO something on the ground, such as the wonderful Indonesian psychiatrist, Dr. Luh Ketut Suryani ,who is working in a desperately underfunded ( self funded actually) programme to help these people that society- and the government who has recently cut their meagre funding- has no room for. Have a look at her website, it is fantastic, and we strongly encourage you to directly donate should you wish to.

We as a business we have locally supported Breast Cancer, Cancer Council, Lifeline, Brightside Sanctuary and other animal charities, but  resolved some time ago to also support external causes that primarily help women, for obvious reasons really- we are lucky enough to have the freedom and money to use disposable income to buy ethical, environmentally sound products, but most of the world’s poor women in developing countries do not have clean water, or enough food, let alone the kind of financial/educational freedoms that we take for granted.

We are so very lucky in Australia- having been to Vietnam, India, and South East Asia over the years the hard life that women lead in these cultures leave you feeling very privileged, and slightly ashamed of complaining about our daily perceived  ”hardships”- but the joy that these women share with you, despite their circumstance, just makes your heart swell with pride at the resourcefulness, persistence and ingenuity of womankind.

The primary focus for me in terms of intent has always been the Fistula Hospital in Addis Abbaba (Ethiopia) which was established by the incredible Australian Dr Catherine Hamlin in 1959, to help women who have developed a fistula due to tearing during childbirth- rather than going into detail, click on the the link to find about this appalling condition, that is eminently fixable.

What struck me like a fist in the chest is that these women, who leak urine/faeces through no fault of their own, are totally ostracised within their communities- often days walk from the nearest bus, who in any case will not carry the women because of the involuntary smell and mess….some have lived apart from their communities for years.

My friend S ( to protect her confidentiality) who has volunteered recently with Medecins Sans Frontieres in Ethiopia ( amongst other nations) has said that it was one of her hardest assignments simply due to the general malnourishment of the population, particularly of course the women who as a result of this lack of nutrition are not able to develop a strong enough pelvic girdle to birth successfully without this complication ( fistula)in many cases.

The decider for me was reading in one of the Australian weekend newspapers about a woman who begged for 7 years in a local bus station to just get the bus fare to distant Addis Abbaba and the potential salvation of the hospital.

I think I cried for a week when I read that.

I am not religious but…Thank God for Dr Catherine Hamlin.

So…we are going to do something about making real and concrete donations from the sale of the products that you love, to help these two organisations concretely and directly.

YOU CAN HELP- WE CAN DO IT!! We will keep you informed as to how is going, with more detail soon, probably linked to our Facebook page so that you can see directly what is happening.

Soap. I’ve absolutely been in love with it since I can remember…. the sensuous pleasure of washing with it, passing it through your hands to create the silky lather, the texture and varied scent of it, the feeling of the fabulous lather on my skin, and just how clean and fresh you feel after an encounter with it.

My encounters with soap have been many and varied, starting as a child with the all- purpose carbolic Lifebuoy with it’s nasty reddish raw meat colour and curiously addictive, harsh medicinal,no-nonsense antiseptic scent, which I can recall as if yesterday, conjured as smells are, direct into our consciousness straight from the emotional brain centre, the amygdyla.

I think it is a curiously British phenomena, Lifebuoy….I have seen it only in the old colonial outposts like India, in recent times, but it is not the same any more.

As a child we were pretty broke, and hence had no truck with the “luxury” of new fangled detergents, just good ‘ol Lifebuoy soap in the boiler with the clothes and then through the mangle ( lots of broken butttons) and onto the line, and I loved the faint antiseptic scent in the wind dried sheets and clothes….maybe I missed my calling and should have been a nurse!
We used it for everything, laundry, slapped on burns,washed gravel out of the inevitable childhood skinned knees,on ourselves, the floors…
I “graduated” at aged 8 or thereabouts to Camay, a cheap lurid pink synthetic bar that was suitably glamorised in early 60′s TV commercials by a cheesecake actress called Katie Boyle who slathered the lather theatrically over her face whilst gushing the benefits, hilarious looking back now.

I took a very long time in the bath imitating the screen goddess and managed to work my way through far too many bars to be accommodated by my weekly sixpence pocketmoney so had to cut back on my major Camay habit.

Then I moved on to Pears soap, miraculously transparent, with it’s fantastic history as one of the earliest soaps made in Britain. but mostly for it’s curious spicy smell…..then came Cuticura another interesting black antiseptic bar (I had major zits by now in adolescence)  and along with my Grandmothers herbal formulas was trying anything to look like a 70′s rock chick ( too fat, not hip enough, what’s changed?!)

The twenties saw various soapy fads but my fave was Coty’s Aqua Manda,an early 70′s invention heavy on mandarin and patchouli, and the beginning of the revival of all things natural, and a move to rediscover natural herbal formulae.

To my total delight I found a crumbling but largely intact bar or this at a garage sale last year and once again a sniff takes me straight back to shopping at Biba  in Kensington High st in my nasty smelly afghan coat reeking of patchouli oil…..sigh.

When I began to redicover my granny’s old concoctions and make the early BB products, first on the list was rediscovering the pleasures of those soapy days of delight, and a range of fabulous traditional olive oil and herb soaps was first on the list- very adult and a far cry from those early bars that made your skin dry and stingy.

There is no comparison between a synthetic detergent bar ( commonly called syndets) that is now the most commonly available mass market “soap”- in fact it is no longer real soap at all, just a compacted, boiled, extruded and moulded  mixture of sodium laureth sulphate ( a synthetic foaming agent)anti-oxidants,hardeners, opacifiers and a sickly throat catching synthetic scent that can be smelt at 100 yards away- revolting, and hugely drying to the skin of course.

When I read magazine articles relentlessly and universally saying ” do not use soap on your skin” I want to shout-YES, NOT THE SYNTHETIC “soap!” Clearly they have never experienced the skin moisturising, gentle cleansing pleasure of a real soap bar handmade with olive and coconut oils and only gentle subtle essential oils from plants as a scent.

Our bars have always been skin friendly as a first priority, carefully formulated with rich nut and plant oils such as hemp, mango butter, and jojoba,and a low concentration of essential oils that do not shout at you- are subtle, and hence do not irritate. You can smell their delightful scents up close, unlike the various national “natural” beauty chains where the sickly synthetic scent ( claiming to be natural???)can often be detected well down the street.

Real Soap of course has been around since Roman times, and palm oil ( click on our front page link 100% palm oil free) has been used since the early 1900′s to contribute to the lather and most importantly provide hardness to a fine bar of soap, and all was fine and dandy until the fast food industry kicked in, when massive amounts of palm oil was required to fuel it, AND the personal care industry.

Hence we have deforestation in the primary palm oil production centres of Indonesia and Borneo, and mass planting of palm oil plantations, with countless species of wildlife displaced or killed-primarily the orangutan.

We decide to act over a year ago and replaced palm in all our products, and in our soap bars by upping the coconut oil content, which is more costly, and leads to a bar that performs beautifully as always, but does not last necessarily as long without palm to add hardness.

Hence we are now trialling the addition of soy wax which will add hardness to the bar and make it as long lasting as palm oil once did, but without the environmental cost,  being one of the major crops grown in the USA, and non GMO to boot.

That is why our bars cost more than the average natural soap- being palm oil free actually increased our costs- as well as our bar size which is, at 125 gms, 25% larger than the average natural soap bars around.
Why not rediscover the absolute skin loving pleasure of soap and water with our soap specials on right now?

My journey into the mysterious, dark, warm world of the beehive began on a motorbike, on the back roads of Tasmania in 1989 when I travelled to Australia from Britain in 1989,with the imperative to get to Tasmania as a priority- thanks to naturalist David Bellamy and the publicity he generated during the Lake Pedder campaign some 10 years earlier, when he was ( gasp!) arrested.

We in Britain (where I was born) were amazed in the early 80′s by the dark green, massive Gordon River on our TV screens, and the drama being played out against this backdrop-it fired my imagination.

I just had to get there…it reminded me of what I imagined the Great Greasy Limpopo River looked like, when reading Rudyard Kipling’s “Just So” stories when I was a child (Jeez, that dates me doesn’t it!)

So, 9 years later, I set off on my BIG motorcycle journey around Tasmania,on a trusty old bulletproof CX 500 Honda, having a ball along the way, getting my bike repaired by fishermen in Strahan, my kidneys pretty much shaken out on the ungraded road to the Arthur River that wasn’t even marked on the map, fighting off scary possums on my first night in a tent – trying to eat fruit that I had unwittingly left by the mozzy mesh “window-and falling under the spell of the stunning deep wilderness of the Apple Isle.

When the only wildlife you see in London are a few blackened, asthmatic sparrows hanging on telephone lines, are an urban gal all your life, you are kinda bowled over…and scared to death by noises out in the bush!

Best of all the road on the wild remote Tasmanian West Coast from Zeehan to Strahan, a smooth new highway curve that motorcyclists dream of clinging to and leaning into,and the intoxicating scent of the bush, with all the Leatherwood flowers in bloom in the rainforest, and the impossibly beautiful view of the golden Henty Dunes backing onto the wild ocean…I was awestruck by it all.

And so I discovered Leatherwood honey

Once you have tasted Leatherwood honey, found only in Tasmania with its assertive, strong rainforest flower scent and flavour you will never go back to all the other wimpy, limpwristed, pretender honeys, trust me!
I carried that honey in an increasingly sticky plastic bag in my gearsack, eating it one blissful spoon at a time, making my already fragrant Lapsang Souchong tea a symphony in my mouth.

I was hooked.

It was even better in our products I discovered, and feels incredible on your skin, in the rich moisture creams that we handmake- as honey is a healing humectant( brings moisture to the skin) and beeswax traps that moisture in.

(We have sample size Leatherwood Honey 15 gm available at only $3.50- ask us when you place an order)

We have a fabulous special this month if you would like to try for yourself – if you spend over $100 on products on our website you will recieve our bestselling Rosehip C Ultrarich Eyecare oil 25ml valued at $24.95!

More soon from the hive…