Menu
Cart

bluemoonadmin

About bluemoonadmin

Posts by Bob Ross:

Naturally coloured soaps

Natural vs Synthetic: our colours and fragrances

We love making craft skincare. For us it’s a passion, a love affair and a geeky fascination. We are proud of that. When we started this journey we set out to use only natural products and a huge part of that mission is making our products look beautiful and smell great without synthetic colourants and fragrances.

Search the internet and you will find thousands of synthetic colourants for making cosmetics. Some of these are just fantastic. Deep blues, sparkling silvers, vibrant greens, sunset yellows. All these colours and more are available in a convenient powder form and can make soaps and other products look truly stunning. The same can be said of fragrances. It’s easy to find a bottle of synthetic fragrance that smells like a fresh morning next to the beach or a warm oak tree in an autumn forest.

While these colours and fragrances are beautiful in many ways they just didn’t fit with our mission. If we wanted synthetic additives in our products we could go to the supermarket and save ourselves hundreds of hours of trial and error. Creating a beautiful blue using a mica requires one teaspoon of powder. Creating a beautiful green using natural ingredients is a huge learning curve littered with mistakes and failures. It’s easy to see why so many products use these synthetic colours and fragrances.

Our way is different. We use natural ingredients for our colours and fragrances. Love the beautiful hue of our Gac fruit and Lavender soap? That colour is naturally obtained by using pure cold pressed gac fruit oil and, an ingredient famous in Vietnamese cuisine for colouring sticky rice. How about our Wanderer soap? All those beautiful colours come from natural sources such as wheatgrass (green) cocoa powder (brown) and kaolin clay (creamy white).

The same mentality applies to our fragrances where we use only pure essential oils for our scents. Take our Rose Tobacco scent, as found in our Rose Tobacco lotion bar and The Gentleman beard oil. This scent was inspired by childhood memories and took untold hours to perfect. Through trial and error and with a heap of passion we blended something far more meaningful than a scent bought in a bottle and created in a lab.

Blending natural scents and colours isn’t easy; frankly it’s really hard. Finding the ingredients, infusing oils, running tests; failure and success are all part of the journey. But it is a fascinating journey full of knowledge and adventure. We like to think of our products as mini works of art. Each one is unique and behind the scenes so many things have to come together to create the final product. We are still learning and challenging ourselves to improve. We hope you enjoy using our products as much as we enjoyed creating them.

Blue Moon Handmade: Healthy skin, Happy planet.

We are always happy to answer your questions, drop us a line here if you have any questions about our ingredients.

Let’s talk Lotion Bars

Let’s talk Lotion Bars

Lotion bars? What are those?

This is a common question from our new customers who have yet to discover the benefits of these wonderful bars. A lotion bar is quite simply a solid form of body lotion. Just like that cream that comes in a disposable plastic bottle that keeps your skin soft and healthy. Except totally different.

Take a look at the label on your lotion bottle and you will see lots of complicated names for unknown chemicals, some synthetic and some derived from animal and plant products. Some of these can be harmless while others can wreak havoc with your skin leaving it itchy and inflamed. And when that plastic bottle is empty what happens to it? Maybe it gets recycled, maybe it spends hundreds of years floating in the ocean. Nobody really knows.

Enter the lotion bar.

Our Lotion Bars are 100% natural and are designed to keep your skin healthy and hydrated without the nasty chemicals, disposable packaging and animal products. We use fantastic ingredients like cold pressed coconut oil, raw cocoa butter and vegan Candelilla wax to give your skin the nourishment it needs. Sound good? It gets better. After combining these main ingredients we add some extra luxury oils such as Rosehip and Argan, as well as our fantastic essential oil blends to create a lotion bar that smells and moisturises like a dream.

Rub the lotion bar on your skin and your natural body heat melts a small amount of the bar allowing it to be absorbed into your skin. The fact that these lotion bars are solid is also a bonus for all the travellers out there as these bars don’t count towards your liquid allowance when flying.


The benefits of Lotion Bars:

  • Reusable and recyclable packaging
  • Convenient for traveling
  • Pure and simple – no nasty chemical ingredients
  • Natural hydration for your skin

Our Lotion Bars:

  • Cocoa butter – extra nourishing and smells so good you will want to eat it.
  • Rose tobacco – silky soft and oh so smooth, try this and you won’t go back to your old lotion in a hurry.
  • Bugger off repellent – our custom blend of essential oils designed to keep those bugs at bay, tried and tested on the beaches of Vietnam.

Check out our shop for the full range or drop us a message here if you have any questions.

Beard oil and Balm

Beard Oil and Beard Balm – what’s the difference?

Here at Blue Moon Handmade we offer our signature beard blends in two different formats; beard oil and beard balm. Many of our customers are curious about the difference so today let’s have a look.

Beard oil:

Beard oil is recommended for all beards. It is lightweight, non-greasy and absorbs quickly into hair and skin to moisturize, nourish and aid in grooming, helping to prevent itchy and flaky skin.

Each of our beard oils features a different oil blend with different properties and scents. Take for example our best-selling Wanderer and Gentleman blends, these medium-weight blends contain nourishing Avocado oil and are both great all-rounders for any beard.  

For those looking for an extra lightweight blend we recommend our Dreamer and Scallywag blends, both designed to be super light and non greasy. The Scallywag features Tamanu oil, renowned for its skincare abilities while The Dreamer features an essential oil blend perfect for those prone to acne and oily skin.

For more intense moisturising of extra dry and itchy beards we recommend our Nudist and Optimist blends. The Nudist features cold pressed Gac fruit oil, a classic Vietnamese oil famous for its stunning red colour and skin loving properties. The Optimist on the other hand combines the maximum level of nourishment with an essential oil blend specifically designed to fight beardruff and encourage hair growth.

Our beard oils come in a 30ml glass bottle with a dropper for easy application. Just put a few drops in the palm of your hand and massage into your beard.

Beard Balm:

Our beard balms are a little different from the beard oils. To create them we take the exact same premium ingredients as in our beard oils and combine them with Shea butter and vegan wax to create a more solid product.

Being a solid product our balms are great for travelling. If you are on the road these balms fit neatly in your toiletries without the fuss of being scrutinized in airports like liquids. The aluminum containers are sturdy and convenient with the added bonus of being easily recycled.

Beard balms are also perfect for longer beards because the Candelilla wax we add helps give your beard some shape and is great for styling even the most unruly of beards. Another great benefit of this wax is that it adds a layer of protection to your skin that helps protect your beard from the elements.

Our beard balms come in a 30gm container. To apply simply rub some of the balm between your palms. Your body heat will melt the balm which can then be massaged into your beard.

Weather you are just starting your beard journey already wear one large enough to make Gandalf jealous, our products will keep your beard healthy and smelling great. Check out our full range of beard balms here for a healthy happy beard.

Still curious? check out this great article