Yep, gazing out of the window at the “weathervane” of Hobart -the wonderfully picturesque and majestic Mount Wellington in Hobart (have a look here live on this local school webcam which has some fab live images of our little city) the winter is really here at last. We hang on to the last balmy Autumn days here with a tight grip, hoping that they will not be the last, because we know that reluctant hibernation looms.

I discovered when I emigrated from the Big Smoke of London that Tasmanians, just like furry little animals in their pre prepared cosy burrows hibernate for a long time over winter, emerging for vital supplies such as natural honey skincare, beer and food!

Being a nation that quite literally lives outdoors ,having fine weather most of the time, there is a sense of resignation that the fire has to be lit, fleecy garments dug out of the back of the wardrobe, along with the Slow Cooker for all those fab stews, tagines and soups.

I recently discovered the joys of sensuously plump, gelatinously tender,Beef cheeks, from Mundy’s Meat supply in Lindisfarne-one of the last real butchers in Hobart who actually selects his steers from the sale yards himself-and REALLY knows his stuff -after 40 years as a country butcher he should! The enticing aroma of a Beef Madras with coriander is just too sexy!!!

Am missing my Kaffir lime ( one of the essential oils that we use in our delicious Lavender citrus twist real soaps) tree like mad ( for my curry pastes)having recently moved house and, whilst I dug it up and transplanted it lovingly to a pot on the balcony, the woody stump of it is glaring balefully at me whilst being blasted  by icy souwester wind gusts…7 degrees today so survival is unlikely.

We are lucky enough in Hobart ( and Tassie in general!) to be within 10 mins of fabulous wild windswept deserted beaches, and one of the other signs of winter are the wild seas which throw up large quantities of kelp seaweed, from the deep sea kelp forests on the Peninsula of Tasmania- Georgie, resident Doggie Diva, loves investigating the fabulously glossy, tangled kelp thickets of beached weed – I’m always amazed at how big it is, and how massive the roots are!

Such pongy explorations mean that a bath once home with her very own Gorgeous Georgie’s Gloss Pet Shampoo bar is a must ..

Not only does kelp taste great- I just love it in all it’s forms, sushi,tastes great in soups too- it has the most fabulous qualities for the skin- moisturising, firming, silkening- and having a great local source at Marrawah on the North West Coast who harvest it from the beaches there and supply it to us.

We use seaweed – just one of the food ingredients we use in our edible skincare products- in, for example,  Seaweed Honey and Herb Polishing scrub ( which, we are told, also makes great scones by the way) Seaweed, Green Tea Scrub Soap and it is included in all of our Natural Soap Shampoo Bars and real handmade soap bars, to which it lends an unparallelled  silkiness and moisturising quality, and creamy slippery lather….Jeez ( throws bucket of cold water over self, narrowly avoiding Mac keyboard) I should take up writing erotic fiction!!!

By the way, happy clients on the independant web feedback site  WOWMOW are posting some fabulous about our products, particularly the Leatherwood Honey Moisture creams…. “This cream is an absolutely amazing product.  I don’t think I knew what actually feeling ‘moisturised’ was until I used this cream “( Leatherwood Honey and Olive Ultrarich Moisture cream)  Hina B which is particularly pertinent as winter arrives- providing your wind buffeted skin with a rich nourishing moisture retaining barrier- ours is quite simply the best around so our clients tell us.

Wrap up tight and watch this space for some new products soon!

Refugees are in the always in the news, usually being unfairly demonised by the appalling untalented shysters that pass for politicians ( particularly pertinent today before the election!) but we are noticing a different kind of refugee.. a definite and significant influx to our website and store of clients returning to quality,  having realised that most commercial skincare is all about packaging and has no substance!

We employ 12 women and they all started off ,when they joined the business thinking that- for example-one of the largest global “natural” beauty chains was a truly natural, authentic product, until we educated them on reading a label, and they realised the massively chemicalised, industrial nature of these products.

Indeed what we are always horrified by is the sickly, hugely overscented goo that passes for so called “natural” products, but unfortunately that is what people think is “natural” because they may have not encountered an authentic, subtly scented product such as ours.

As a client, Jenna wrote to us recently “The difference the Beer and Honey shampoo has made to my hair is simply astounding – I do not get dandruff any more, and my scalp doesn’t get that dandruff itchiness either! I had never thought that I’d be free of either of those things! I’m fairly sure now that it was the chemicals in commercial shampoos, specifically the sulfate foamers and cleansers that have been irritating my scalp, as it simply doesn’t happen anymore. Paired with the apple cider vinegar rinse, this is the best shampoo/rinse combo I think I will ever find – no more itchiness, scabby piles of skin building up on my scalp, bad smelling shampoos, or that dreaded ’snowflakes’ covering my shoulders! I can’t really express in words the difference the Beer and Honey shampoo has made to my hair  - just thank you!!!! Also in Hobart, there is one other store that states it sells “fresh, safe “products. But if you merely walk past “Rush” ( you can guess who she means!)  you can smell that horrible, chemically stench wafting out the door. I love that when I open my drawer in the bathroom what I can smell is a light hint of honey, with a dash of rose geranium (that’s the scent I have in my moisturiser – heavenly!), and I’m not knocked off my feet by that obvious chemical smell.”

The new clients tell us that they are amazed by the quality and outstanding value for money ( which is very heartwarming, all say aaahhh) and the returning refugees from overpriced overpackaged mainstream products tell us that nothing works as well, and importantly in these straitened times, are very economical.

Indeed our Baby Bee Baby  products have been around for 20 years, long before chemical free baby care was thought of,and we are now seeing teenagers who were brought up on it, and have continued their love affair with our products, which is warm and fuzzy.

The way I look at it, and the reason I started the business, is simple- naively perhaps- I LOVE authenticity and honesty in all things- people, products, movies..and wanted to make something I was proud of.

It is a bit like eating handmade good bread, or beautiful locally grown neon green pungent olive oil, CWA rhubarb and rosepetal jam,homemade pesto with sun hot basil from the garden ( not that commercial crap filled with sawdust cheese, and in one brand, cabbage???!!!)  or a beautiful solid piece of handcrafted furniture glowing with effort, all are a pleasure to use or consume.

it is the realness of it, the untainted, unadulterated, unmessed with nature of things in the that I love….you can see that someone has carefully made it by hand, and you can taste the effort, and in our case feel it.

Luckily we have an abundance of all of the above in Tassie, which is in itself a very REAL place to live, indeed mainland refugees come here all the time seeking a refuge- quite literally- in a place that has a slower, quieter more authentic existence, where community is important, and the noisy external stimuli are exchanged for the tranquillity of nature- navel gazing!

A good example of REAL is one of our ingredients raw,direct expeller pressed ( cold pressed) coconut oil.

Remember frying yourself in the sun in your teens ( we all did it, even in sun starved Britain!) using coconut oil for suntan oil?

I LOVED the smell of that, of course all “coconut”mainstream skincare products are synthetically scented.

Most coconut oil such as copha, is deodorised for commercial use, but in recent years we have been proud to source the most fantastic, yummy intensely coconutty oil from the South Pacific, which has the most fantastic health benefits, externally and internally.

I would highly recommend the book on their site by Bruce Fife ” Saturated Fat May Save Your Life” which offers fascinating insights into the health benefits of coconut oil.

We use it in all our Moisture cream, Body Creams, Cream Cleanser  and Balm products, and the natural true coconut oil scent is just wonderful….I am currently making some delicious curries, muffins and laksas with it too!

Best of all these people have brought social and economic benefits directly to the island people, enabling them, by developing their Direct Expeller Method machinery, to press their own oil on site instead of having to take a poor price dictated by the multinationals that owned the giant pressing plants, and in addition preserving all the fabulous lipsmacking, skindrinking goodness of the oil.

Have a look at their site which is very informative..

It’s all good

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!!

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?