As if we didn’t already LOVE Sephora for being trend setters in our industry, now we love them even more after launching their Breakfast in Bed product line. Shampoo, shower gel and bubble bath are available in three mouth watering breakfast fragrances: Café Au Lait, Fresh Cream and Belgian Waffles. Don’t they sound delicious? What a way to wake up in the morning!

Sephora is always on the cutting edge of the industry’s latest and greatest trends…and food fragrances are continuing their hot streak. We’ve noticed our Bramble Berry food fragrances have been selling like hotcakes (no pun intended).

Jump on board and add a little “breakfast” to your own body products! Try some of our best selling food fragrances like Cybilla Chocolate Espresso, Oatmeal Milk & Honey, Latte Flavor Oil or our Fresh Baked Bread with a splash of our Caramel Flavor Oil…Mmmm!

Bramble Berry just added a new fragrance – Smoky Patchouli. It smells suspiciously like firewood in the bottle but in cold process soap, smells like a rich, deep and expensive Patchouli. You can find it here.

First of all, major kudos to Amber for these amazing photos. Don’t these jojoba beads look luscious and intriguing?

At the request of multiple customers, Bramble Berry just added jojoba beads. What are jojoba beads? Liquid jojoba oil is actually a liquid wax. Like many oils, it has different fatty acid profiles that make it the oil (wax) that we all know and love. One of these fatty acid profiles turns into a true hard wax (or a jojoba wax ester) when separated out. Unlike other exfoliants, these beads are a circular shape with soft edges ensuring that no microscopic tears are formed in the skin when exfoliating. Microscopic tears allow for premature wrinkling and also may introduce bacteria into the skin. It’s important to treat your skin right. Are you using the right exfoliants on your face?

The INCI name is Simmondsia Chinensis (Jojoba) Seed Oil plus the color for ingredient labeling. Some ideas for using these cool and colorful additives are: Liquid Suspension Base additive, an alternative to a sugar or salt scrub or just for a little color in a traditional scrub, in cold process soap for an exfoliant, and in melt and pour soap. The melt point is 160 to 170 degrees so the jojoba beads will do well when added at a more cool (read: not steaming) temperature.

The suggested usage rate is 1 – 15% of the product. This roughly equals out too 4 Tablespoons of beads per gallon of suspending liquid soap or 1/4 to 3/4 Tablespoon of beads per pound of cold process or melt and pour soap.

What a pleasant surprise to toodle over to one of my favorite blogs and see that they’ve reviewed our Organic Fusion line. They loved the body butter, stating: ‘My skin literally DRINKS this stuff up. It’s soft and luscious, and leaves me feeling moisturized but never greasy. I loooooooooove it.’ Click here to read the full post.

I had a fun afternoon today, testing new trends forecasted for 2008. These are the same exact recipes but look at how different the soaps look. The color, the texture and the trace thickness are all vastly different.

This small test batch shows the importance of using fully tested fragrance oils for cold process soap. After all, when you are making a 5 pound soap batch, it’s always nice to know if a fragrance will accelerate trace or turn a nice shade of brown (ruining the perfect swirl or geometrically balanced layers).

In the photo above, the soap on the right top looks lumpy. It is in fact, very lumpy. The fragrance made the soap get all clumpy with the appearance of cottage cheese. Whoops. That is one fragrance that Bramble Berry will not be bringing in.

In the photo above, the soap on the left is starting to rapidly heat up. It also showed an alarming propensity to accelerate trace (as evidenced by the nicely formed peaks on the soap).

For every fragrance that Bramble Berrycarries, we’ve tested at least 100 more to find that one fragrance. The two problem soaps above are not the end of the testing. Each of the bars in the batch will be sniff tested at the 6 week mark and, if they happen to make it through that (they normally won’t), we’ll retest the same fragrance in a 5 pound batch and a 8 pound batch to ensure that they will hold up to the rigors of real life soaping.