Natroma Handmade Goat's Milk Soap Wins Best Buy Award!

Natroma - handmade aromatherapy organic goat's milk soap 

We’re delighted to announce that The Green Parent magazine has awarded a Best Buy award to our Natroma Carrot & Calendula organic goat’s milk soap in their 2016 Natural Beauty Awards!

Handmade with organic cruelty-free certified botanical oils and aromatherapy grade essential oils, our Carrot & Calendula has been a popular soap variety for a while.  So we were thrilled to hear that one of our handmade natural soaps beat off competition from much larger companies, to achieve the Best Buy award!

Our goat's milk soaps were developed especially for eczema, psoriasis and sensitive skin types, so we hope this award encourages more people to try using natural soaps as a more gentle and natural way of cleansing their skin.  We think the addition of the goat's milk really adds something to the way our aromatherapy soaps feel on the skin, helping sufferers of eczema and psoriasis who often struggle to find cosmetic products that don't cause skin irritation. 

Each year The Green Parent Magazine Beauty Awards search for the safest, cleanest, greenest and most effective natural products in a range of categories.  Each of the winning items in the 2016 awards has been carefully chosen and tested by an independent review panel.  The Award winners will appear in the 2016 Natural Beauty Bible which will be published later in July.

We decided to enter this year’s awards because of The Green Parent’s approach, they say:  “We insist on products free from petroleum-based chemicals, propylene glycol, parabens or sulphates and NO animal testing so you can be assured of their safety. We believe that beauty is more than skin deep. So we seek out those products that are made by passionate people; companies that we can trust; those who put care and love into their work”.

Thanks Green Parent - we're delighted with this win!

Natroma launches New Mum pregnancy range!

It's been a long time since we last posted....sorry, but we've had a really busy start to the year! Our thanks to everyone who's placed orders on the websites, or popped into our shop to pick up supplies and have a chat. (We'll try to keep things more up to date from now on!)

Behind the scenes we've been working on a brand new Natroma range, especially for new Mums or Mums to be. There’s a great deal of myth and fear surrounding the use of essential oils during pregnancy, with various lists of ‘banned’ essential oils circulating on the internet. We often speak to anxious pregnant ladies who've heard bad things about one essential oil or another, and after they've left us we usually shake our heads in disbelief over the latest horror story!

Sadly many of these stories circulate without any sound reasoning or clinical evidence, so it’s little wonder that new Mum’s often feel confused by the contradictory information and may even decide that it’s safer to avoid using any aromatherapy products during their pregnancy. We think this is so sad, since correctly formulated aromatherapy products and professional holistic therapy, can provide comfort and support during what can at times be an anxious (and sometimes difficult) chapter of a woman’s life.

So we're launching our New Mum range to provide user friendly, luxurious pampering aromatherapy products that can be enjoyed throughout normal pregnancies. The range has been formulated with knowledge and care, and we hope that women will feel confident in using the range. Wherever possible we're using organic ingredients with therapeutic essential oils correctly diluted in lower concentrations than usual (typically at or below 1%).

We're making no medical claims about our pregnancy products, but they have been carefully formulated to take into account the growing body of evidence that essential oils can support a variety of health issues. For more information visit the New Mum Pregnancy page on the Natroma website.

Fizzing Butter Melts

For a while now, Stourbridge customers have been enjoying our lovely petal covered fizzing bath melts as stand alone products. By popular request, we've now added these to The Natural Soapworks website, so our internet customers can also enjoy these gorgeous bath treats! They are individually wrapped in cellophane bags, making them perfect as small gifts or as an affordable alternative to our usual bath bombs.

Unlike many other bath melts we've seen, ours do not contain any synthetics or detergents, so they are completely natural with only essential oil blended fragrances and no artificial colours. They are quite tricky to make since they have to be hand rolled in petals, and we've also designed some lovely new fragrances including Uplift, Exotic Flowers and Ylang Geranium. You'll find that our Fizzing Bath Melts gently melt and fizz in hot water and release lots of petals and botanicals into the bath water, for really luxurious bathing!

They contain lots of organic (Soil Association accredited) shea and cocoa butters, so bath melt fans have been telling us they are so moisturising that body lotion is no longer required and they're also suiting dry or troubled skin conditions. We'd suggest that you just pat your skin dry after leaving the bath, to allow the natural butters and essential oils to sink into the skin. We're so pleased customers are enjoying using these so much!

Christmas is coming!

We've been a little quite on the blog in the last few week - it's because we've been so busy! We're settling into the Ruskin workshop very nicely, and visitors may well have noticed a certain Christmassy smell in the air. Yes, we've been blending our Christmas Spice essential oil blend again, and our natural Christmas decorations are now smelling wonderful and will be hung on the Christmas tree very soon!

So we've finally managed to upload some of our Christmas gift ideas onto the Natural Soapworks website. This year, we've expanded our range of naturally decorated recycled gift hampers - and they look very pretty without causing problems for the environment.

Mindful that times are still tough, we've also done everything we can to keep prices down so website customers will find a great range of hampers containing pretty hand decorated goats milk soap slices and botanical fizzing bath melts - all for under £10.

We're expecting the next few weeks to be very busy, as we prepare for a number of Christmas craft events. So website orders are currently being processed on a 2 day turnaround, and we will continue to post out hampers until the Christmas postal deadline is reached....or we run out of soap!!

Visitors to the Workshop, are advised to place their Christmas orders as soon as possible now - we're expecting to have to close our Stourbridge order book within the next week or so. We hope to see you soon!

Ruskin Glass Centre shop opens

The Natural Soapworks new shop at the Ruskin Glass Centre opened yesterday. We'd like to thank all of our loyal customers who called in to see us, and sent us good luck cards and flowers. We were really touched to receive so many good wishes, and it really made our day! We're still busy stocking the shelves and working on the unit, but here's a picture of how the shop area looked on the first day.

During the coming half term week we intend to open the Ruskin shop between 10am and 4pm on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. This will coincide with the opening of the Ruskin Glass Centre's cafe, which will be offering a selection of complimentary cakes and coffee to visitors.

We're likely to be closed later in the week since we are re-fitting the Studio 7 shop, but local customers can ring our new telephone number (01384 399451) so we can advise on opening hours. We will also post an update on the blog, later in the week. We intend to re-open Studio 7 at the Red House Glass Cone on Saturday 30th October for the 'No Tricks, Just Treats' Halloween Funday. There will be no impact on website orders - these will be processed as normal.

The final thing to mention, is that the 2010 Christmas Catalogue is now available to local customers, to pre-order natural skincare Christmas gifts for collection from our Stourbridge premises during November and December. Many of these Christmas gift ideas will be uploaded to the website later this week.

What is aromatherapy?

These days, there are all manner of products on the market claiming to have aromatherapy benefits. The problem is that quite often cosmetics have names that make them sound like aromatherapy products, but they only contain minute amounts of essential oils or even have synthetic fragrances. These products may not even be formulated by a professional Aromatherapist, so how do you spot the genuine article? We hope the following information about essential oils and aromatherapy will be useful.

Aromatherapy is often defined as the careful, controlled use of essential oils, to enhance the well-being of the mind, body and spirit. Essential oils are highly concentrated, volatile, and fragrant substances that are extracted from flowers, berries, twigs, wood, seeds, fruits and leaves of many familiar plants. Essential oils have many different properties and research has shown that each oil contains a complex mixture of chemical components which contribute to essential oil therapeutic qualities. These could be stimulant, expectorant, anti-infectious, anti-inflammatory, relaxant, calming, soothing or uplifting. The important thing to stress is that they need to be used with respect and knowledge, so aromatherapy is far more than just pretty smells!

A professional Aromatherapist will have extensive knowledge of the therapeutic qualities and the chemical components within each essential oil. This enables them to create synergistic blends that are personalized for their client, taking into account their needs and any existing health conditions. In the hands of a knowledgable professional Aromatherapist, this means that these plant essences can be therapeutically blended to assist with stress, enhance health and support the body’s own healing processes. Clinical aromatherapy focuses on achieving synergy within the essential oil blend, and usually employs massage to use essential oils in a holistic treatment. So while this is not a medical treatment, aromatherapy has been found to work psychologically and physiologically to improve well-being.

In the coming months, we’ll be featuring a number of essential oils to explain their qualities and why we use them in our handmade natural skincare products. In the meantime, you can see more about our natural ingredients on our websites.

The Natural Soapworks and Natroma product ranges are formulated in-house by a professionally qualified Clinical Aromatherapist, and member of the International Federation of Professional Aromatherapists (IFPA).

Natural foot care

In the third of our series of articles abour Autumn skincare, today we're looking at the feet.

A major problem associated with the feet at the end of Summer, is dry, cracked heels. These are typically caused by wearing open backed sandals during the summer. Cracked heel problems can vary between dry or flaky skin, to hard skin and deep fissures which may be very sore. So it’s a good idea to treat your feet to a pedicure.

We’d suggest using a natural pumice stone to smooth away areas of toughened skin. But a gentler approach would be to use a foot scrub to slough away dead skin. This is why we developed our Peppermint Foot Scrub (see http://www.naturalsoapworks.co.uk/Saltscrubs.aspx)

These contain a mixture of fine salts (including Dead Sea Salt), nourishing botanical oils, honey, shea butter, and Vitamin E. It's fragranced with lavender, peppermint and tea tree essential oils, and leaves the feet feeling moisturised and with a delicious fragrance! After smoothing the skin, we'd suggest that a balm product is applied to assist with re-hydration of the skin.

Psst....watch this space, since we have a new foot product on the way! Our rich Foot Balm contains jojoba oil, cocoa and avocado butters, with healing lavender, chamomile and tea tree to refresh and nourish the feet. We'll be adding this to the website in the next few days.

"Oh what a lovely smell...."

Everyday we hear positive comments about the lovely smell within our little shop. It's a joke that you only have to arrive in the courtyard at the Red House Glass Cone, and then you simply follow your nose to find our shop!

It's amazing how smells can be so evocative, and it's nice to know that we can create such a postive reaction. The second comment we usually hear is how our products do not smell like the ones on the high street, and descriptions usually include words like: uplifting, relaxing, gorgeous, sophisticated and above all...natural. It's at this point, we usually have to explain about the difference between synthetic fragrances and the pure aromatherapy grade essential oils that we use.

So what are essential oils? A technical definition would be: concentrated, hydrophobic liquids (i.e they won't mix with water) containing volatile aroma compounds derived from plants. More simply they are the natural oils extracted from plant material. Usually this is via steam distillation, but they can also be expressed (such as squeezing the peel of citrus fruits) or by solvent extraction. The cost of essential oils varies according to how difficult it is to extract the essence - so this is why citrus oils are typically cheap whereas rose (which may require kilos of rose petals to produce a single ounce of rose otto essential oil) is very expensive.

Essential oils are highly concentrated essences, each with it's own distinctive aroma, which should be handled with knowledge and care. They should not be applied undiluted on to the skin. They are sold in small bottles which have a dropper attachment and this is so they can be carefully measured out, and there is less chance of them being accidentally injested. They should always be stored in a cool, dark place away from animals and children. Aromatherapists use these volatile aromatic compounds to assist a person's mood or health, and research is still ongoing to evaluate the effectiveness of aromatherapy as an alternative therapy.

So why do we use essential oils in our products? Well, we think it's better to use natural essences on the skin rather than synthetics. But great care has to be taken when developing skincare products, since even these "natural" plant oils can irritate sensitive skin if they are used in the wrong concentration. That's why we use controlled percentages in our products so customers can enjoy the soothing benefits of these lovely fragrances, safe in the knowledge that they are well within the limits that are laid down within the EU's Cosmetic's Directive which governs the sale of all cosmetic products manufactured in Europe. Despite these concerns, we believe that natural essences are more harmonious for the skin, than many of the cheaper synthetic alternatives that are available.

We hope you found this little article interesting and the next time you say "what a lovely smell", you can now appreciate that you're admiring a natural fragrance that's captured the essence of many plants species.

What's so special about goat’s milk soap?

It’s a question we’re asked most weeks! We can guarantee that anyone who asks, has never tried a goat’s milk soap before. We’ll try to explain why we think goat’s milk soap is special…

Goat’s milk soap is more difficult to make than a typical handmade bar, since the milk affects the saponification process. We use real goat’s milk (not powdered) since it contains proteins, amino acids and Vitamin A to nourish and soften the skin. You may read some articles which claim that natural goat’s milk soap has the same pH as the skin. We’d disagree with this claim, since soap is a naturally alkaline substance, so it’s doubtful if a natural soap could become slightly acidic without the addition of chemicals.

Our formulation has come about after years of perfecting our soap recipe. The brief was to create a hard, long-lasting bar with a rich, creamy lather whilst being highly moisturizing and skin-kind too. Okay, we admit that we’re perfectionists so that’s why it’s taken a few years to create our recipe!

It’s no accident that our soap contains many botanical oils and butters (such as olive, coconut, shea and cocoa) and these had to be carefully balanced to produce the rich texture and foaming qualities we were looking for. We also use a cold-process saponification manufacturing process and use traditional handmade wooden moulds. Each new soap is matured for 4-8 weeks so it hardens and becomes mild before it is presented for sale. So the next time you try a new natural soap remember that each recipe will be different, since the skilled soap maker crafts their recipe to produce particular results.

So what can you expect from a Natural Soapworks goat’s milk soap? The first thing people always do, is give the bar a sniff! Fragranced with pure essential oils, each soap variety has its own special character, and this adds to the pleasure of using the soap each day. We also love pretty soaps, so we use natural clays and spices to add colour and we often swirl them through the soap so each bar has unique patterns. The goat’s milk gives a unique, creamy lather that’s so rich that it can be used for shaving or as a natural body wash. The soap suits delicate skin conditions, and people who visit our little shop are often invited to try washing their hands before making a purchase. Most people are impressed by the conditioning feel of the lather, and everyone comments on how soft their skin feels after just one wash. So we’d sum up our goat’s milk soaps as being pretty and fragrant, but very functional and full of top quality ingredients.

Tempted to give it a try? Visit out Goat’s Milk Soap page if you’d like more details:

http://www.naturalsoapworks.co.uk/GoatSoaps.aspx