Jadryga

Weird... maybe your e-mails are bouncing? I mailed them because I tried to purchase once but couldn't find my country in the dropdown list. They fixed it and replied the next day itself.

Yep! They can be used as facial masks. French Green Clay is a strong detox and drawing clay for oily, blemished skin. Pink Clay is gentle and moisturizing, suitable for dry skin. Red Reef is also a strong detox clay and can even be used to dye hair naturally. Washed Blue is good for dissolving impurities and cleansing the hair follicles for clearer pores. Pastel Pink is also very mild and moisturizing, suitable for dry mature skin. Up to you how you'd like to sell them. You can either sell them dry (customers mix the clays with water to use) or wet (hydrosols, glycerin, water, etc). Of course you can mix them with lots of things, powdered herbs, powdered spices/oatmeal, honey, other clays, cornmeal for scrubbies, etc. For soaps you'll have to wait for a soaping expert

Just run a quick search on the forums. I posted a link to some for bath salts a few months ago.

I may start for fun! Anyone know where can I get some gooood prices for SFIC bases? Or even better... anyone know whether that SFIC co-op may be back in the works?

Yep, got something arranged with someone already for it... if all goes well, we'll probably be using USPS flat rate boxes for now, maybe looking at the "slow boat to China" for future shipments though.

Purdy layout! But I agree with some of the others... I prefer "saponified oils of" and I would either remove the batch number, or start from say... 50 or 100. Otherwise, looks good!

The hotel is here in Malaysia, but I'll be ordering the soaps in from the US. It's mainly word of mouth actually, through a friend of mine, but from that I got the foot into the door to bring some samples over, and they loved them! I usually include a little write-up about each product along with the samples, which they really liked since they felt that it gave the product more of a personal touch. It's a boutique hotel with about 168 rooms to start with, but I've seen the concept for some of the rooms, they're quite lavish, looks more like a posh apartment than a conservative hotel. They're going for the "natural" theme, so that's one of the things I emphasized when I was pitching. I deliberately brought only FO and colorant free soaps. They're also offering me the chance to supply the shampoo and conditioner but I'm really not sure about that... it wasn't something I'd been researching, so I'm not sure where I'd start and if I can find something within the budget. If someone has some suggestions, do shoot them by me! I really hope this works out!

Actually, I just thought about flat rate boxes. At 20lbs per box, that would be about 13 flat rate boxes for 250lbs, which would come up to about $481. Can 20lbs of soap actually fully fit into a flat rate box though?

I have a hotel that's interested in getting soaps from me! They're looking at 4000 units a month, and want something somewhat substantial, so I was thinking 1oz guest soaps, which would mean about 4000oz, which works out to about 250lbs. I plugged 50lbs into the USPS postage rate calculator and it came up to $230-$240 for Priority International! Does anyone have any suggestions for cheaper alternatives I could look at? I'm not too familiar with bulk shipping options

Yep, it does

I've only tried out my shea butter lotion so far, though Lindsay was kind enough to include samples of the other two too! I'll return to this poll after I test them UPDATE: Okay! I've done my testing. I voted for shea butter, since it's the lightest of the lot. Most of my customers like lightness, so I went for that. From lightest feel and quickest to sink in to the heaviest: Shea butter, Decadence, Indulgence. Though, note that I've also added 1% cromoist hydrolyzed oats to my shea butter mix, so that may have affected the feel slightly. Even though Decadence and Indulgence are slower to sink in, they're still not overly greasy, which suits me just fine. A little goes a long way. Personally I prefer something a little heavier so I may just be ordering some of the other two in the future to offer something a little more heavy duty. I'm so moisturized now

If you really want an edible body spray, I'd go with a water-based one... the oil-based one, depending on your oils, may be too thick unless you use something really light like FCO. Otherwise, play away! Nothing wrong with straight coconut oil, Darbla, it's really up to you.

Ooo... you learn something new every day! I cheat though MMS has an awesomely useful measurement converter. http://www.thesage.com/calcs/measures.html

Hmm... what's SWO? Can't quite figure it out

Actually, if you take a look over at the Soap Dish forum, there's tons of info on making conditioner there.

netting material is material that's full of holes, almost exactly like the stuff used to make those small fish nets for aquariums.

No All I can find here are amber glass bottles. Fine for body/massage oils, but not for lotions. Lindsay was kind enough to get some from Pine Meadows (it's near her) to include in my box though! I just smeared some on DH, my sister and her bf They all like it! DH and my sis are very particular about lotions, they can't stand greasies at all, so that's a good review to me! I'll be handing them out to various other "testers" tomorrow Thinking about getting some sample packets from Kangaroo Blue to fill and hand out.

I received my box yesterday, whipped up my first batch today! I used a 1:1 ratio of base to distilled water with 1% hydrolyzed oatmeal. Amazing! My skin just lapped it up, it sank in really fast with absolutely no greasy feeling. Love it! Thank you Lindsay!

Hi Valerie! Welcome to the addictive world of B&B! Yes, you can use FOs in lotion as long as they're B&B safe. I use 1% of the total weight of the lotion, so that's 99% base, 1% FO. For 16oz of base that would be 15.84oz of base, 0.16oz of FO. We use the metric system here so it's actually easier for me to measure in grams. 1oz is roughly 30g so 16oz is 480g which means for 1% FO that's 475.2g base, 4.8g FO. If your containers are straight from the supplier and have never been used then no, no need to clean them out. They're clean enough already. By cleaning them yourself, you'd just be introducing water to the tubes, which is no good HTH!

FOs and EOs straight make my skin itch. Lavender so far is the only one that doesn't, but it's still a fine line for me there. Geranium makes me itch like mad, so do FOs, even if I just touch the outside of the bottle where a teeny drip ran down the side.

I've read good things about CoQ10 over at the Dish, not too sure about the rest.

I think with lavender, you can get away with it somewhat, but peppermint's known to irritate even when diluted. I can't remember about lemongrass. You should be able to use any fixed oil you like, really, though preferably ones that won't aggravate blemishes. FCO, hazelnut, jojoba (iffy, this one, some say it clogs), rbo, up to you. If you want to mix it with witch hazel, you could maybe add some polysorbate 20 to the EOs so they incorporate properly, saving you the trouble of having to keep mixing it. Another water-based alternative to try is aloe gel. Maybe a mix of both? You could also add some strongly brewed calendula or chamomile tea or even a teensy bit of honey for added anti-inflammatory properties. Don't forget to add some preservative if you're planning on making enough to store. A safe dilution rate is no more than 3%, if I'm not wrong.

I think I read on the Soap Dish forum that this is normal for emulsifying conditioner, and as Sarah says, won't come through in the finished product.

I was expecting something ugly from the thread title, but I actually think those are pretty funky! Like some of them said, looks intentional

I can't quite remember actually, it's been a while since I've coded in HTML. UPDATE: Ah, ran a quick search. This is a little specific, only really applies if you're playing around with raw HTML code, though I think some building tools for websites incorporate it as well. Excerpt from: http://www.helpauthoring.net/help/index.html?hm_projectprops_htmlex_htmlex.htm ----- Font size encoding: This setting allows you to choose how font sizes are defined in your output. You can choose pt (points), px (pixels), % (percent) or ems (where 1 em = 100%). Which setting you choose controls how fonts are displayed on the user's screen and whether or not the user can change the font size. Choose Pixels to lock your font size and layout, Percent to allow the user to change the font size. Points: When you export the font size in points the user cannot adjust the font size. However, the size of the fonts displayed on the user's computer screen will vary depending on the Windows screen DPI setting and/or font size settings. For example, if you develop your help on a machine with Windows set to 96dpi (the standard) your text layout may be incorrect on computers set to 120dpi (fonts look much too big, text in hanging indents may be wider than the indent etc). This is because the size of the fonts changes but the size of the other layout elements (indents, locked table cells etc.) doesn't. Pixels: This is the only setting that ensures that the fonts and your layout will always be displayed exactly as you see them on your development machine. The font size is always uses the same number of pixels, so it is always the same size relative to other elements of your layout like indents, graphics and so on. Percent or Ems: If you select percent or Ems the user will be able to adjust the font size in the help, for example by holding down Ctrl and turning the mouse scroll wheel. This may or may not be a good thing, because the size of other layout elements (graphics, indents, locked table cells etc.) will not change, so the user adjustments may "break" your layout. ----- Basically, if you specify font size in the HTML block, you'll be locking it to a specific number of pixels/points/percent. The CTRL + mouse scroll in this excerpt functions the same way CTRL + +/- works, but I don't like using the mouse scroll because it's easy to overshoot. The way CTRL + +/- works varies according to browser. Excerpt from: http://forum.echoechoplus.com/showthread.php?threadid=9085 The only browser that really complies to the standards is Opera: it scales everything in the page when you enlarge text: images, etc. It's like a magnifying glass. Firefox is only scaling the text and it breaks your layout. IE does not enlarge text with certain length units (px, pt) and it's against the standards to not scale if the user wants to. Many webmasters like that IE is not scaling because they have control over their layout. I like it too. If the browser is going to scale text, make it scale not only the text but the whole page, like Opera.