Darbla

I wonder if he's simply using more Vybar than normal? I think my next batch I may try that. Darbla

I've tried three times to place an order. All three times I had a TON of FOs in the cart when it wiped out. I'm pissed now because I've wasted a couple hours going thru all those picking out what to get and I still haven't got that order placed. One time my internet connection died and that's not their fault, but the other 2 times the cart just plain wiped out my order. Has this happened to anyone else trying to place an order now? EDIT: OK, after I beatched about it awhile ago it decided to work this time. So I now have a massive AH/RE order on the way. Darbla

I guess I'm just lucky and have tougher skin than usual (knock on wood!). I used Tony's 'Love Spell' uncut this week, and unfortunately I get that awful chemically, burnt plastic note straight like that, which makes me fear that anyone close enough to me to smell it is also getting that awful note. My overly sensitive nose picks that up in almost all FOs though, even in finished products, but do the rest of you find that mixing them into finished products reduces that? Darbla

A sort of related bottling question: I have a friend who wants some samples of FOs, but I'm out of small bottles and am not ordering more just to give out free (I will when I'm in need of more supplies). I have a bunch of little test tube looking vials that came with some health supplements in them that I'm thinking of cleaning and using instead, but I have no idea what kind of plastic these are. I'm debating on telling her to transfer them to other glass containers herself, but I suspect she won't bother. What would you do? Would you chance the test tubes anyway? And speaking of test tubes, I wonder how inexpensive real glass test tubes with a cork on top would be compared to the dram bottles, cobalt and amber glass, etc. I usually get? I keep all my FOs in a dark room anyway. Hmmmm...... Darbla

And I took full advantage of that during the last CS sale, kandlekrazy.

I'm having a difficult time wrapping my olfactory senses around Pumpkin Cornbread. I guess I've eaten so much cornbread as a staple food all my life that it just doesn't seem to me to be something you'd want in an FO. I suppose I'll just have to get some and see for myself. Agreed! My preference is 4 oz to test with. That gives me barely enough for a batch of soap, some candles, and a few different b&b items. I can make do with 2 oz but I don't like it, and I recently ordered for the first time from the Candle Source and got 8 oz of everything (their prices were irresistable). I get frustrated with these sales where you can only buy 1 oz of something, but I will buy that rather than go completely without. Darbla

Could just plain coconut oil + flavor + veg glycerin for warmth be used? Or is there something about coconut oil that makes it less than desirable by itself but instead better mixed with other oils? Darbla

Where do you live? I'm moving next door.

I brought Tony's 'Love Spell' with me to work today, but I don't think I'm brave enough to ask my co-workers what they think about it!

I put this in the wrong dang forum. Could a mod move this to Bath, Body & Cosmetics, please?

I know you're supposed to dilute FOs before using as perfume, but do any of you skip that step when you're using it for yourself? I've been dabbing on a little straight Coconut Lemongrass all Summer with no ill effects, and now I'm thinking of using Love Spell the same way. Maybe I just have tougher skin than most? Darbla

I'm intriqued by all the raves I've read for Celtic Moonspice, but does the description not match the name to anyone but me? "A wonderfully fragrant blend of warm spices, cinnamon, clove and nutmeg. Gives you that warm home & hearth feeling like a cozy cottage with a fireplace on a cold snowy evening." That sounds more like a bakery scent than what I would think something called Celtic Moonspice would be like. Darbla

I don't have Pumpkin Souffle but I absolutely love Hansel & Gretel's House. I know it's not intended to cross over to bath & body, but I've been putting it in a lotion base and using it. No ill effects at all for me but I wouldn't pass this on to anyone else just in case. It smells like graham crackers and other sugary goodies. Darbla

Do you think I can go ahead and use this as a pillar, or do I need to melt it and make something else? I figure worst case I'll convert it to votives or tarts. It's the 4794 wax. Darbla

OK, you got me curious: how much was it? I haven't ordered from them yet so don't know, but I ordered only $25 worth of FOs from another place and it cost me $10 to shipping. I thought that was excessive but I'm beginning to think that's normal for FOs. But I suppose it cost UPS or whoever basically the same whether they're bring you $25 of stuff or $200 of stuff.

I almost posted this exact same question the other day when I was trying to clear my own confusion over so many suppliers! I eventually thought "Nah, no way anybody can pick just one." If I had to, I might could stick with just The Candle Source or maybe Day-Star.

An article I found today on this subject: Aroma and Arousal You come home after a long day of work to find dinner prepared and your partner sitting at the table with a sly grin. The meal is like none you’ve ever had. First course: cheese pizza, warm and gooey but kinda bland. That’s followed by a bowl of buttered microwave popcorn. Revenge for something you said? Then, a weird dessert: pumpkin pie smothered with lavender ice cream. “Honey,” you finally ask, “is everything okay?” Odd Food Smells and Libido Pumpkin pie and lavender, and other food smells like doughnuts and licorice, don’t seem like the kinds of odors men would find sexually stimulating. Yet for several years, these allegedly potent odors have appeared in media stories about male aphrodisiacs, garnering wide-eyed looks and more than a few guffaws. The odors from the above-mentioned foods were the most sexually tantalizing of those tested in a study carried out in the late 1990s by Dr. Alan R. Hirsch, who directs the Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago. Among all the odors tested, the combination of pumpkin pie and lavender produced the greatest increase in arousal (a 40 percent increase in penile blood flow). The next most arousing odors were a mix of cinnamon buns, doughnuts and licorice; pumpkin pie and doughnuts; orange; and lavender and doughnuts. Other stimulating aromas were buttered popcorn and cheese pizza. About what you’d expect to smell in a frat house rec room the morning after a big party. Sexual Scents: Fantasy? Brown University psychologist Rachel Herz, who has made a career investigating the science of scent, laughs a little derisively when asked about the Hirsch study. “There’s nothing inherent about the scent of any particular food that makes it sexual or arousing,” says Herz, author of the upcoming book The Scent of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell (Harper Collins, October 2007). “There’s nothing inherent about any odor to make you do anything. It’s all a function of how you’ve acquired the meaning of that smell.” And the meaning of pumpkin pie’s odor to these 30 men? “How odor comes to have meaning to the person is through their past experiences with it,” she says. “So without ever having smelled pumpkin pie before, it’s not going to do anything for you. But if your first sexual experience was at Thanksgiving under the dessert table, then that scent may become associated with it. In the future, when you smell pumpkin pie, you are brought back to that time and place in a very instant and visceral way, and may experience sexual arousal.” A study Herz directed at Brown, published in the International Journal of Comparative Psychology, proved the validity of this idea with several experiments. One involved 30 women playing a computer game. Permeating the air was a novel odor concocted from buttered popcorn, dirt, and rain. The more satisfying it was for a woman to play the game, the more likely it was for her to rate the odor as pleasant. Other experiments showed a similar trend. Smell and Emotion Why is it that smells can be so evocative and, in some cases, sexually stimulating? The answer has to do with human physiology and psychology. Among the senses, smell is different from the other four primary senses because it is connected to the part of the brain responsible for emotions and memory. In fact, according to Herz, the olfactory cortex—the part of the brain where smells are processed—was the site from which “the parts of the brain that are responsible for emotional processing, associative learning, basic memory and motivation—the collective structures of the limbic system—evolved from. In other words, the ability to experience and express emotion grew directly out of our brain’s ability to process smell.” Herz believes the link between emotion and smell is so strong that they’re “functionally the same.” One result of this connection is that once a smell is associated with an emotion or memory, it tends to remain there for a long time. If you come across that odor again, your brain makes the association so quickly that you don’t have to even think about it. It’s almost a reflex. And first impressions count. Herz says she likes the odor of skunk because she has positive memories associated with her first encounter with the perfume of a skunk: riding in a car through the country on a lovely summer day with her mother. Another example comes from a woman Herz knows who told her she hated the smell of roses because the first time she had smelled them was at her mother’s funeral. The role of scent in creating memories was demonstrated in an unusual German study published in Science earlier this year. Scientists had subjects play a computerized game in which they memorized the location of playing card pairs. Once a pair’s location was learned, the subjects received a waft of a strong rose scent. Later, when the subjects went to sleep (a time when the brain processes things it has recently learned), the rose scents were again administered. The next day, the rose-scented sleepers performed an average of 11 percentage points better on memory tests of card pair locations. “By presenting the rose odor cues we … enhanced the transfer of these memories into the neocortex,” neuroscientist Jan Born, one of the study’s co-authors, told The New York Times. Men: Pavlovian Dogs? Herz says she knows of no scientifically credible research that has looked at specific odors that provoke male sexual response. She ascribes the dearth of scientific research into odors and desire to the fact that there is not enough commercial interest. “From the point of view of the marketplace, what’s really more of a moneymaker is a fragrance that will make women sexually aroused and interested in men,” she says. “It’s somewhat culturally taken for granted that men are always sexually aroused. The harder part is getting women to be.” But Hirsch believes that Herz is being unfair to his study and too simplistic in her analysis of why an odor can be sexually arousing. He says his study (which Herz admits she hasn’t seen) is scientifically valid. It was randomized, controlled, and peer-reviewed before being published in three different journals, including the Journal of Neurological and Orthopaedic Medicine and Surgery. “Sexual arousal is inhibited by all sorts of different things,” Hirsch explains. “By inhibiting those inhibitors [with odors], you can induce sexual arousal. It doesn’t have to be a direct affect.” He offers several other possible reasons why these food odors increased sexual arousal. “It could have induced a Pavlovian conditioned response, making men recall their girlfriends and wives,” he says. Or they could have stimulated a part of the brain called the RAS (Reticular Activating System), increasing the men’s alertness and their awareness of sexual cues around them. Odors could also have acted directly on another part of the brain, the septal nucleus, which controls a male’s erection. “There’s a direct anatomic connection between the olfactory bulb at the top of the nose and the septal nucleus. So anatomically it makes some sense.” The biggest challenge in interpreting the results of his study, Hirsch says, was to find a hypothesis that might explain why food odors were always sexually stimulating to males, when items such as perfume were not. “The best theory we could come up with,” he says, “was evolutionary. That in our distant past our ancestors would congregate at a point of food kill. That’s where they would have had the greatest chance of finding a mate and having successful procreation. So there may have been a selective advantage to have increased penile blood flow in response to the smell of food.” Sniffing Out What Works for You Although plenty of potentially arousing scent elixirs exist for men, the trouble is finding the ones that appeal to an individual. It’s a daunting task because the average human nose is capable of distinguishing between 10,000 to 40,000 different odors. If no universal aroma aphrodisiac can exist, how does one go about finding effective scent triggers? “I don’t know, other than retrospective self-analysis,” Herz says with a laugh. “You can think of a past sexual experience, or a lover who had a particular fragrance you found exciting, or be aware when you come across an odor you find arousing.” Another way to discover what odors pique your carnal interests, as well as those of your sweetie, would be to pull on your lab coat, grab some test tubes, and start experimenting. If that doesn’t sound romantic enough, try heading to the bedroom with an armful of fruits, vegetables, candies, cakes and liquors—and anything else you might care to sniff, nibble, or rub.

I did a search for 'men' and got mostly what men like to wear on themselves, and I searched for 'sexiest' and got much of nothing. So I hope I'm not duplicating a previous thread, but here goes: What FOs are sexiest to men when women wear them? I read awhile back that some study said pumpkin pie and lavender (but not together). Is that true? I'm having a hard time believing a pumpkin pie is sexy. What have you gotten the most compliments on from men? Darbla

I'm bumping this in the hopes someone has used it since your original post...

You know how poor distilling makes some EOs have a burnt, acrid smell like they barely survived a fire? Is there any way to redeem those and get some use out of them? I have a bottle of vetiver and a patchouli that I ordered from Camden Grey that are like that. Darbla

Thank you so much for this notice! We were talking about RE in another thread and I mentioned how I wanted to try some, so here's the best chance I'm going to get! It would be nice if they allowed more than 1 oz / scent because I usually use up at least 2 testing it in different products, but 1 oz at a good price is better than none! Darbla

I have been fixated on Gembertaarts since getting it from them a few weeks ago, along with a bunch of other FOs, and I will probably include a body spray of it in a package I'm sending a friend in England. I haven't even done anything with the other FOs from them yet because I can't get tired of Gembertaarts. You guys have got me wanting to get busy with them though. I think Cinnamon Sandalwood & The Great Pumpkin will be in my next order!

Oh goodness. I had not paid much attention to Rustic Escentuals (just been too blinded by all the other companies I've tried so far), but this thread made me go to their site and they have some fab sounding stuff. That 'Dark Knights' and 'Dreamcatcher', for example. The descs for the ones asked about in this thread sound awesome as well: Essence of Bethlehem Due to overwhelming requests we're adding some biblical scents. These scents have tested wonderfully and we think you're going to love them! They'll be perfect during holiday seasons as well as year round use simply for the pure joy of the scent. This oil is a deep blend of Frankincense and musk laced with soft rose petals and sprinkled with patchouli and delicate orange blossoms. We didn't know what to expect when this sample arrived and it's absolutely brilliant in wax! This scent proved a powerful performer with strong (but not overpowering) throw. This will also make a captivating incense. Essence of Jesus This oil is a woody myrrh fragrance adorned with a touch of lavender, clove leaf, and patchouli set upon a bed of sweet musk. Very earthy and masculine - a divine choice for holiday & religious candles as well as anything you need for your masculine line of products such as lotion or body mist.

Hey, they're not in the supplier thread: http://www.candletech.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5492 Can somebody please add them? Thanks! Darbla

Yeah, I started out getting 1 oz samples and it just was never enough. Now I buy 2-4 oz for testing. 4 oz if I'm testing it in candles AND b&b products (perfume, lotion, massage oil, soap, etc.).