As much as I wanted to go all handmade for my bathroom, I wasn’t really into bar or solid shampoos, which seems to make up most of the handmade shampoo market. However it turns out that I found something that’s not a solid shampoo, but gets around using SLS that most of the handmade liquid shampoos are using in. The Gudonya Salty Dawg Creme Shampoo is a salt scrub, and this particular one has a wonderful Tahitian Vanilla scent. I don’t think I need to tell you how obsessed I am with that scent, since I have conditioner, shampoo, and soap from Gudonya with that one. The salt shampoo cream goes on nice and smooth, and all you have to do is add a bit more water after you have applied it to make it nice and lather rich. My hair feels slick, shiny, and clean after I’m done using it, and the scent is just divine. Get it at Gudonya’s Etsy shop.

This was, literally, the first handmade soap that I ever bought. I’m a longtime sufferer of adult acne, and having mainstream solutions fail time and time again, I had turned to handmade soap. SpaTherapy’s Tea Tree Lime soap was great – it left my face feeling very clean, but not dry, flaky, or red. The scent was an interesting one – I’ve never experienced tea tree oil before, and the lime had a nice, fresh counterpoint to the bar. Like most facial bars, this one also lasted me quite awhile with 4 oz – it was around 2 or 3 months before I had to start looking for some more soaps.

Ingredients: Saponified Coconut oil, Palm oil, Castor oil, Safflower oil, glycerin, purified water, goat’s milk, sorbitol (from berries), Sorbitan oleate, soybean protean, titanium dioxide (mineral), Honey, Tea Tree Essential Oil & Lime essential Oil.

Buy it at SpaTherapy’s etsy shop =)

For every handmade soap, there is a story behind it – a story of the person who put their own sweat and blood into providing you with the most awesome soaps and beauty products in the world. Behind the Soap is a column where I talk about the behind the scenes part that shapes the scents, shapes, and passion that goes into the products that the soap maker puts out.

The first profile that I would like to present to you is of Coquette Bath and Home, formerly known as Good Scents Bath Company. This is a one woman business ran by Cari Shannon. Cari graduated with a BS in Management from Purdue University. 2001 is when she opened a gift store, which was a childhood dream. Sadly it was claimed by the economic strife that has been running rampant, in the winter of 2006. However, the store opened her up to the wonderful candle making world. Cari had found a candle that suited her needs – not perfectly, but well enough – however the day after she placed a large order for her shop, she found the exact same candles at JCPenny – for only 25 cents more than her wholesale price.

That’s when it clicked – it was time for her to make her own candles. She set to work, learning through trial and error, and made a stellar product that knocked the socks off of anything she could pick up from distributors. Cari started with votives, but soon found herself going into jar candles, bead sachets, melts, and travel candles. And of course, when you start making candles by hand, most of the time you find yourself gripped by the hand that is handmade soap.

Two years after the candle epiphany, Cari got into handmade soap making, and made the magic happen again. You’re probably wondering why she’s Coquette Bath and Home instead of Good Scents Bath Company. In November 2008, her customers started asking if her shop had moved. Another person in Texas was using the name, and instead of fighting out a costly court battle that might ultimately achieve nothing but headaches, Cari rebranded as Coquette Bath and Home, which represented who she is today.

Now on to Cari herself – along with being a wonderful woman, it’s a wonder that she’s even here with us. In 1994, she was hit head on by a drunk driver, and wasn’t supposed to walk, along with them assuming she had been brain damaged. She recovered, there was no brain damage, and the doctors call her recovery miraculous. Cari is a single mother of two teenagers, with her son about to enroll in a local community college, and her daughter is hitting her sophmore year of high school. I certainly wish her all the patience in the world with that.

Cari is the type of person that I love to see running a small business – not only does she want her business to be profitable, she also wants to grow something that means much more than mere profits. This is her love, her dream, and that passion is passed on in every soap, candle, and beauty product that you’ll find.

You can find Coquette Bath and Home products at Etsy, Artfire, and at her own wonderfully designed site. I received a sample package from Cari, filled with the most marvelous of products that I’ll be reviewing in the weeks to come.

If you haven’t had the pleasure of reading a Dirty Sanchez product description before, you owe it to yourself to get over to her Etsy shop and start reading . These are hands down the most hilarious product descriptions I have ever read. Now that that’s out of the way, the next thing you’ll want to do is get your booty over to her shop to buy some of her luscious handmade soaps. I went through her sampler over the last two or three days, and there wasn’t a soap in there that I didn’t like. The lather on all of them was so lovely and luxurious, and the scents were clean, crisp, and lovely. I loved the packaging as well, and you get paper versions of the description with each soap, along with the most awesome packing slip ever that I’ll need to scan for you. There are plenty of different soaps to choose from, so go take a look at Dirty Sanchez.

SpaTherapy, as you have probably figured out, is one of my favorite handmade bath and beauty product sellers. It helps that they’re very close locally (just 45 minutes away) and it also helps that they almost always have an awesome new product just around the corner. The Raspberry Vanilla Natural Vegan Deoderant is one of those things that really helped to convince me that handmade is where it’s at. I won’t lie, I’m overweight (dieting and all that fun stuff though, so ) so I tend to sweat a lot more than some piddly little deodorant can take care of.

I was pretty much resigned to just slopping it on every time I went to the bathroom, but then I found out about their natural deodorant. It neutralizes the smell, and lasts forever – I have to say that I love it, and they carry so many different kinds of handmade deodorant that you’re sure to find one in a scent that you like. I’m just a sucker for all things vanilla based.