Show us some love, get free stuff!

We'll be at the Indie Craft Experience this weekend, and we can't wait! To celebrate, we'd like to show some appreciation for all our wonderful customers and the nice things they always have to say. All the Facebook, Twitter and Instagram mentions of us this weekend will be entered in a drawing for free products in December- twice if you include a photo of us, our display, or our products! We're in booth #120- head all the way to the back, and we're directly in front of the Beehive's salts and scrubs workshop (which should be excellent). And if you should decide that you'd rather buy bath salts or sugar scrubs than make your own, we'll have plenty for sale. We also have tons of bar soap and lip balm, our new Honeybee Hand Soaps, a variety of craft beer soaps, and shaving soap sets, which include badger shaving brushes and vintage milk glass shaving mugs. We're offering free gift wrap on any purchase you have us ship for you. And this is our first holiday season offering the option for "A Year of Soap," a wonderful gift for any soap lover- we'll mail a choice of seasonal soaps and lip balms to your lucky gift recipient each month all year. So get to posting! You never know which of this great stuff we'll be giving away.

What came first, the idea or the eggs?

...The idea for shampoo bars, that is, with egg yolks as an ingredient? It's a really good question, actually, and one I can't answer, as I don't remember. We've been keeping chickens for years, and while I've always heard that egg yolks are great for shiny hair, I've been squeamish about that whole raw-eggs-in-the-hair thing. It just sounds so... gloppy. But we've been getting LOTS of requests for shampoo bars, and in a solid bar of soap it's obviously not messy. Once the soap is finished, it looks like any other bar of soap, and you'd never know that eggs are involved, except for the great results with your hair!

If you're not familiar with the idea of a shampoo bar, it's a great alternative to liquid shampoo. It lasts longer, it requires very little or no packaging (as opposed to a big plastic bottle) and is better for you and your hair, being chemical-free and full of a variety of wonderful ingredients like coconut oil and goat's milk and essential oils and honey. We really load ours up with luxury ingredients like silk and vitamin E and moisturizing oils so that you get a decadent, silky, sudsy bar of soap.

Despite all the requests, we've held off making shampoo bars, because we were waiting for our new flock of chickens to lay eggs. We're very picky about what goes into our soap, and especially so with animal products. Almost everything that goes into our soap is vegan, so with anything that isn't, we verge on obsessive. The honey and beeswax comes from our own bees so we can be certain they're not managed with chemicals at any point, the goat's milk we use is local and raw, and now that our hens are laying we have eggs that come from free-range chickens that are spoiled rotten and not fed anything creepy like hormones or other animals. In fact, we may have to write a post later introducing them all- they're gorgeous, and quite fancy, except for their names being things like Biscuit and Moo shu (don't worry, it's ironic- they're egg birds, not meat birds).

Anyway, we hope to have shampoo bars ready for some of our upcoming events, but either way they're in the works and will shortly be available on Etsy. Enjoy!