The Wonderful World of Natural Scents

Enjoy the Wonderful World of Natural Scents

Our family recently adopted a Havanese dog, a walking dust mop, and, unlike Soapy’s seal-like coat, Sugar's hair never stops growing, so she requires professional grooming. After her very first haircut, she looked mighty fine, but she reeked from a synthetic fragrance that wouldn't go away for a week. 

“Smells like Aunt Beth got in the car twice,” my friend Michael used to say. You can bet Aunt Beth couldn’t smell herself. 

What’s the Problem with Synthetic Fragrance in Skincare?

Synthetic scents have become ubiquitous. I can't walk through my neighborhood without smelling dryer sheets. Not that they smell bad per se, but they aren't natural. 

The concoctions are manufactured in factories using man-made chemical compounds, many derived from petroleum. Synthetic fragrances can cause allergic reactions, dermatitis, headaches, asthma, and endocrine disruption. These compounds accumulate in human tissues and can cause long-term harm, including reproductive issues and potential toxicity.

Why Odor Fatigue is Good

Chemically derived scents override your natural olfactory response to stop smelling something once you've already smelled it. With natural aromas, you'll smell them, but then that aroma fades into the background so that your brain can smell other smells. 

This is a boon for the hog farmer, garbageman, and vet tech who has to express Sugar’s anal glands. The department store sales associate at the perfume counter may have it even worse. 

Toxic Chemicals in Daily Deodorants and Soaps

Once you appreciate the pernicious ubiquity of synthetic fragrance, you'll see it in daily-use products such as detergents, soap, shampoo, and deodorant. When these products contact your skin, they enter your body and bloodstream through your skin—your epidermis, sweat glands, and hair follicles. It’s no wonder that underarms are often irritated. Read the ingredients in the deodorant you use, then compare that to ours.  

Once you’ve read the ingredients in your deodorant, you’ll think twice about putting all those chemicals in such a sensitive area on your body. Your thin-skinned underarms are a busy crossroads of blood vessels and lymph nodes.

The #1 Cause of Contact Dermatitis

Synthetic fragrances are the top cause of allergic contact dermatitis. Often labeled as "fragrance" or "parfum," they potentially hide hundreds of synthetic compounds. Skin can become itchy, have scaly red patches, blisters, or swelling.

Appreciate, Relish, and Revel in Your Sense of Smell

When we think about our traditional five senses, we often undervalue our sense of smell. You wouldn't wish anosmia, the inability to smell, on anybody. One of the unfortunate symptoms of COVID-19 was a loss of the sense of smell. 

It's estimated that 80% of taste is dependent on smell.

Scientists have described some 400 odor receptors in humans. They say we can distinguish one trillion different smells! 

The Benefits of Pure Essential Oils vs. Synthetic Fragrance

Crush a mint leaf, and you’ll release the fragrant oils within. Peel an orange, and its zest squirts orange essential oil. That blooming purple field of lavender looks like a garden, but in fact, it's a crop, grown and harvested to make lavender essential oil. 

Plants have evolved their chemistry over millions of years. They create scents to keep insects and other pests from eating them. People have used these oils for centuries. We have acquired vast knowledge of their properties and safe use.

Herbal Benefits

Whereas a synthetic fragrance has chemicals that might suggest an aspect of the scent of lavender, real lavender contains over 100 distinct volatile organic compounds.

Essential oils can be beneficial for your skin. Geranium and lavender oils, for instance, offer antioxidant, antibacterial, and anti-inflammatory properties that treat acne, soothe irritation, and reduce wrinkles. They help tighten sagging skin, balance sebum production for both oily and dry skin, and promote cell regeneration to help fade scars. 

Visit Our Natural Soap Shop in St. Louis

If you visit our soap shop in St. Louis (please do!), you’ll smell our amazing aroma before you open the door. “Worth a trip for the smell alone.” You’ll get a whiff of all the essential oils we use to scent our products. 

It might seem overwhelming at first, but after five minutes, your nose is back to normal. These natural scents won’t stick around tenaciously. 

You’ll be ready to enjoy sniffing the 50 or so varieties of soap we offer. Start with Almond Aloe and work your way to Vanilla. 

Lift a bar to your nose, and rather than taking a big snort, take short little sniffs, like a puppy. It works better. Some people like to reset their sniffer with a whiff of coffee beans.

Explaining Our Six Natural Scent Groups

We’ve separated the scents we offer into six groups, not counting our many unscented options. (Did you know that commercial products claiming to be scent-free employ chemicals to mask otherwise nasty odors?)

Floral   Herbal   Citrus   Mint   Spice   Woody

Our Most Popular Scent—Lavender

Lavender gives us a naturally floral scent without the need for costly extracts from flowers.

Farmers grow fields of lavender and harvest the entire shoot—flowers, leaves, and stems. Through steam distillation, the essential oil is produced.

The Lovely Scent of Rose

As opposed to lavender, only the flowers of a rose have the scent. One can't cut down a field of roses as one harvests a field of lavender. 

It takes oodles of hand-picked petals, which weigh next to nothing.  

Capturing the aroma is complicated. The ancient, labor-intensive process called “enfleurage” involves laying petals in fat to absorb aromas. As you might imagine, this is very expensive. Real rose absolute costs over $1000 a pound, too dear, we feel, to add to soap.

How We Make Affordable Natural Rose Products

We've always wanted our products to be affordable—luxurious but not luxury priced. Of course, natural scents are more costly than imitations. However, there’s a vigorous market for essential oils. They are produced around the world.

For a rose scent, we use rose geranium essential oil. Scented geraniums hybridize readily. Plant cultivators have created a wide range of scents—rose, lemon, coconut, apple, ginger, mint, and citronella, to name a few. Like lavender, the entire plant contains the oils. Fields are harvested and steam-distilled to produce the essential oil. 

Herbal

Classic Herbal aromas come from essential oils of basil, clary sage, fennel, lavender, marjoram, and thyme. They're refreshing, invigorating, and soothing. Sage Lemongrass soap is a favorite, as is our Rosemary Mint Shampoo Bar. 

Citrus

What's more refreshing than citrus? We make many products with the fresh, lively scents of lemon, lime, orange, and grapefruit. Another citrus we adore is bergamot, Citrus bergamia. The fruit grows in sunny orchards on Italy’s Amalfi Coast. The essential oil perfumes our Italian Bergamot bar.

We put may chang, Litsea cubeba, in the Citrus category even though it's technically in the Laurel family. The herb contains an abundance of citral, source of the bright lemonly aroma. May chang is popular in skin care formulas, known to calm skin and to balance oil production. 

Spice

Our Spice scents include favorites like cinnamon, cassia, nutmeg, and cardamom. These warm smells can evoke fond memories of baked goods and mulled cider.

We have a slew of spicy products, besides 10 soap varieties, including Serenissima Hand Spray, Ambiente Room & Linen Spray, Candles, and Aftershave.

We include West Indian Bay Rum in the Spice group and use the essential oil in our face and body soap, Shave Soap, Beard Oil, and Deodorant. Bay Rum is often targeted to men, but women love the scent too. 

Woody

Woody scents evoke feelings of warmth and comfort. Like a Christmas tree, they fill a home with calm and coziness.

Olfactory treasures in this group include cedarwood, fir needle, cypress, patchouli, tea tree, eucalyptus, vetiver, frankincense, and myrrh. Most of these scents come from trees, but others possess a woody scent such as patchouli, which is actually a mint. 

Mints

The Mint family is large, including many herbs such as basil and rosemary, but here we're talking about spearmint, peppermint, and cornmint. These essential oils contain varying strengths of menthol. They are calm and cool. Our Goodbye Headache helps many sufferers of tension headaches. A shower with Spearmint Orange, Triple Mint Oatmeal, or Eucalyptus Mint will cool you down and lift you up.

Escape Through Your Shower Door

Open your nose to the wonderful world of natural scents! These aromas make deep connections with our emotions, memories, and appreciation of life. They can enhance your mood, relieve stress, and improve your physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being.