Feature Friday: Lemons + Bonus Recipe

We LOVE using lemons at Halo Soap! They are featured in our Lemon Cuticle Butter which takes advantage of the acidity in the lemons to help break up the dry skin around your cuticles. This product has been a best seller since we started making it about 4 years ago. It's loaded with rich butters and a little goes a long way. When used just as a cuticle butter, this product can last close to a year!

Lemon Cuticle Butter is

• made with lemon juice and lemon infused water
• over 50% rich butters and oils like shea butter, cocoa butter, avocado, jojoba and wheatgerm oils
• is dual purpose for dry, rough skin and can be used on elbows and heels as well!

That isn't all we love lemons for! My favorite way to drink a refreshing glass of ice water? With lemon and honey! Honey that we get from a local beekeeper, btw :)

Here's my recipe for this delicious concoction:

• 2 cups of hot water
• 1-2 tablespoon of honey
• 1 large lemon
• 2 pint glasses 
• ice
• strainer

1. Fill a Pyrex with 2 cups of hot water. Not boiling! The goal is to have the water warm enough to dissolve the honey. Add your honey to the hot water and mix, mix, mix until it's all dissolved!
2. Take your lemon and roll it across the counter a few times to help release the juices. Cut the lemon in half. Over a strainer, squeeze one lemon half into each pint glass. Make sure you get all that good lemon juice out!
3. Fill each pint glass to the top with lots of ice.
4. Now add 1 cup of your warm (NOT HOT! Hot water could fracture your pint glasses.) to each pint glass.
5. Mix and enjoy!

Do you have a favorite way to use lemons? Let us know in the comments!

Testing New Face Cream Recipes

 
With the New Year comes the desire to test out all sorts of new products to consider adding to our product line. Some things we've been working on between soap batches:

• Natural deodorant
• Whipped Body Balm
• Solid Lotion Bars
• New Face Creams
• Botanical Salves

Today, I'd like to talk about face creams. I constantly struggle between bringing our clients recipes that contain only 100% natural ingredients: botanical oils, essential oils, limited preservatives, etc. and bringing them products containing cosmetic actives for things like wrinkles and fine lines. My answer is always to create both. Cater to those looking for only natural alternatives as well as those looking for the "actives". If that one cosmetic "active" is in a natural cream base, it's still better than some of those petrochemicals the big companies offer!

Our most recent developments consist of two extreme opposite types of products:
Hibiscus Rose Facial Lotion with Wrinkle Defense Complex - a light lotion base containing a wrinkle complex consisting of Matrixyl™ 3000 and Argireline®. Matrixyl™ 3000 boasts "45% less deep wrinkles after 2 months" while Argireline® tests produced a reduction in deep lines and wrinkles. We've also incorporated jojoba oil, evening primrose oil and avocado oil in this test batch.
Coconut Facial Balm - a rich, luxurious cream with simple, effective ingredients for deep moisturizing. Containing only virgin coconut oil, kukui nut oil, shea butter, glycerin and fragrance, this rich facial balm can be used all over the face, neck and decolletage. It's great for daily moisturizing as well as facial mask applications.

My initial thoughts after testing these two products are mostly positive!
Hibiscus Rose Facial Lotion with Wrinkle Defense Complex - For this lotion, I packaged it in an airless treatment pump. I may or may not change the packaging on this one.  Maybe make it a little thicker and put it in a jar? I also felt this product could be a little more emollient. The spreadability is short and I'd like it to glide a bit more. I used about 5 pumps for full cover and I'd like to get that number down to 2 or 3. We will continually test this product and hopefully bring a short product run to market at an introductory price!
Coconut Facial Balm - This product turned out surprisingly awesome! Thick creams that are mostly oil based always scare me.  I have oily skin but since I've been designing more oils based moisturizers, my skin has been reacting to them wonderfully. This is a very thick balm that needs only a small amount to be effective.  I scoop out a small pea sized amount, warm it in my hands and apply to my entire face and neck. It leaves a soft, dewy look to the skin and takes only a few minutes to nicely soak in. I would like to make this product 100% natural but removing the coconut fragrance and replacing it with an essential oil, but the coconut scent is just so lovely, I'm not sure what to do!

Results? People are constantly coming into the shop and telling me how great my skin looks. It's definitely not flawless, but I thought I'd post some pictures anyways. Here I am fresh out of the shower after applying these new lotions:

So there you have it!  A detailed walk through of our thought process when it comes to making and testing new products.

Vegan Lip Tints

These vegan lip tints were a blast to make!  I hate wearing lip stick but I love lip balm that is tinted.  It's great because it gives you lips just a hint of color an it's nice a glossy.  At Halo Soap, we've decided to start with three different tints to see how our customers like them.

To better see the colors, here is a skin swatch:

This fun  new product can be purchased from our website.