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Label to Sell Scrubs

We need to talk about labeling. If you want to sell them, it's really important that you label this product as a scrub, not a lotion. You label it as a scrub and then you list the ingredients in the descending order in which they've been used. Then you use the common name or the INCI name for all the ingredients in the product. Include your contact information so in case a consumer had any sort of issues, they could contact you. Usually, their issues are gonna be 'How can I buy more of that fabulous stuff?' Then you just put the quantity on the container. If you want to learn more about labeling, the book 'Soap & Cosmetic Labeling' by Marie Gale has every single labeling thing you could ever possibly use. Are there any other questions? Let's do a series of questions about scrubs. Oh yeah, series of questions. You had beeswax was in this particular scrub recipe. Allison Kurt says 'Is raw, locally sourced beeswax' 'from a honey company okay to use' 'in soaps, scrubs, lotions?' ...

Is raw, locally sourced beeswax okay? As long as their filtration process is good, you're great. A natural bee, natural honey, when you get honey from a beekeeper, it usually has a lot of detritus in there. Everything from bee parts to dust to a lot of things. As long as their filtration process is great, absolutely. I have definitely seen some soap makers that have hives that have figured out how to do their own straining through a combination of fine grain sieves and how they're able to also move onto smaller grain and smaller grain so they get everything out. Absolutely, use local stuff. It certainly smells the best. Just make sure there's no stray pieces of dirt, dog hair, or bee parts in it. Great things to know, to consider, and be looking for. Thank you. Sharon Shaw asked 'What is the difference again' 'between a scrub and a polish?' Ah Sharon, thank you for asking. That's a great question. The difference between a scrub and a polish is just the vernacular. It's literally marketing. Usually a scrub is going to be larger grain but no one that defines this stuff. It's just usually in terms of consumer. A scrub is larger grain. A scrub would be jojoba bees. It would be your salts. It might be your sugars, the larger grains. A polish, that implies fine grain. That implies detail work. That implies it's going to get your skin clean without taking off the entire first layer. A polish is usually a facial product. That's gonna be your baking soda, your bamboo extract, which I love for facial product, your kale and clays, and some of your colloidal oatmeal. Usually a polish is just gonna be tiny, tiny, tiny grit where a scrub is going to be larger in size. Great. Camielle Matthews had asked. Again, there's some questions about other ingredients. One is 'can you add activated charcoal to this mix?' 'What would that do?' 'Would that add color?' Another question was about chia seeds and can you use chia seeds? Good questions. Activated charcoal, chia seeds. Let's tackle those separately. You would use activated charcoal, the same kind that you take internally to help you with an upset stomach, in your facial scrubs because it has great clarifying properties. Think about what it's doing in your stomach. It helps to take away toxins. That what it does, that's why it makes your tummy feel better when you take them. In a facial scrub, in theory, again, this is a cut claim that the FDA is very, very certain is a drug claim. Saying stuff like removes toxins, that's a drug claim. FDA not such a fan of it. We extrapolate out and say if it does that in your stomach, it probably helps to dry out toxins in your face too and in your face products. You could add charcoal to any of these. You could either buy it in bulk like Bramble Berry has it in bulk or you can buy it in a powder form in the store in tiny little capsules and break them open. The good thing about charcoal is it's very efficient with drawing out toxins. The bad thing about charcoal is the dark, dark, dark black that stains clothing and yes, will totally color your entire scrub black. In this case, it would probably color it gray but the second it got on your skin, it would be black 'cause you introduce moisture to it. This, it would go gray in because you'd be adding black to white, which equals gray. Yes, you totally can use charcoal in all of these scrub products. It would be fantastic. You could add it to this especially and you could turn this into a clarifying mask 'cause it's already got the clay in there. You totally could use that. As for chia seeds, yes, you totally can use chia seeds in your scrubs. If you use them in your scrubs, some things to keep in mind. Chia seeds, when water is added to them, get very gelatinous. They also usually are alive. That's why they're so good for your body. They're filled with all those nutrients, all the vital minerals and it's just great. That means if a chia seed is sitting in here, it is going to grow stuff. You don't want stuff growing. By stuff, I mean literally you can grow little tiny chia plants. If you're gonna use chia seeds, make sure you are, do you want a chia plant in here? Probably not, if you're gonna use chia seeds, make sure they're irradiated. Actually make sure that they are something that's designed for a cosmetic product. A better option might be chia oil. You can buy chia oil that's extracted from the seeds and you can use that. In here, in this recipe for example, you would replace the fractionated coconut oil, which is the liquid part of this recipe, with the chia seed oil. Then you'd get all the great benefits of the chia seed without having to worry about the chia plant growing in your product. In here, you could replace the sweet almond oil with the chia seed oil. The one thing to keep in mind though is if you're replacing and you're mixing and matching your ingredients, what's the shelf life gonna be? What is the shelf life of chia seed oil versus sweet almond oil? Remember, the more expensive the oil, the shorter the shelf life. Chia seed oil has a shorter shelf life than sweet almond oil. By using chia seed oil, if we used it in here, we'd shorten the shelf life of this emulsified salt scrub. That's something to keep in mind when you're formulating your own recipes and super fun to figure out you guys. Doing the detective work on this stuff, so fun. Your friends and family are going to love you while you're doing the detective work on what's the best ingredients for you and your family and your skin type. I love it, are we okay to take some more ingredient questions? Go for it, I love talking ingredient questions. I could tell, I love it. This again is where all that artistry comes in, right? One comment was about coffee grounds. Coffee grounds, oh my goodness. Coffee ground are like the ingredient d'zur last year because some bright scientist out there figured out that caffeine helps smooth out cellulite. Everybody was like, if I take coffee grounds and I grind them up and then I just put a bunch of oil on my legs and then put the coffee grounds on my legs and put saran wrap on my legs, will I be able to have smoother legs for summer? (laughter) The answer is yeah, it's a temporary effect though. It lasts for about six hours, just an FYI. Six hours? Six hours, yeah. Yes, you can totally use coffee grounds for scrubs. They're fantastic because like walnuts, they don't break down. Sugar breaks down. Coffee grounds do not break down. The next question is do I use fresh coffee grounds or do I use used coffee grounds? In soap, I always use used coffee grounds because in soap, what happens is the coffee grounds absorb the moisture in the soap, leaving little tiny indentations where the soap is and tiny, tiny, tiny little halos around each coffee ground where the water went (imitates popping sound) into the coffee ground as your soap was curing. In cold-processed soap, it's very important that you use used, wet coffee grounds. In your scrubs, it doesn't really matter. If you use wet coffee grounds, what ends up happening if you've just introduced water to your scrub and you're gonna need a preservative. If you use dry coffee grounds, you don't have to use the preservative but the smell is much more pervasive and the brown tint will happen more. You're washing your face, you're like 'Woah, what's going on, why is this brown?' It's because you're basically making coffee on your face. (laughter) If you're using used grounds, those grounds have been used once and they're not gonna go brown again really. Those are some of the considerations when using coffee grounds as an ingredient. I love the, you guys, think about coffee grounds from a great coffee company. Stumptown, Starbucks, or something like that. You're from Seattle and so you're using all Seattle-based ingredients. You're making a Turkish mocha coffee scrub using a local company's coffee. There's so many great location-based possibilities if you're using coffees in your scrubs. That is really fun to think about. I love seeing your face light up when we talk about things that you're excited about. So fun, I've got one from our producer Jamie in here that wants to know about orange and lemon rinds that might have been zested. Can you put that on your skin? Again, then would you need preservative? Jamie, that's a great question. Can you use orange and lemon rinds on here if you've done them? Those are fresh. Orange and lemons, when they sit out on the counter for a very long time, do they mold? They mold. Yes, you would unfortunately need to use a preservative if you are using them because those products are not going to stay. They're gonna mold in there 'cause there's nothing in here that you've done to it to make it inherently not mold. What if you dry it out, right? You can buy dried orange peel. You can buy dried lemon. That is less likely to mold but when a consumer in the shower, the hot, moist shower, dips their hand in and there's wet lemon peels in there, they can introduce moisture. To be on the safe side, you do use a preservative for that. If you're making it for family and friends, and you're like 'Dude, this is gonna last you two weeks.' 'I just gave you the smallest size ever.' 'Use it up tomorrow and then you're done.' 'Or use it once, put it in the fridge' 'and use it again next week.' Yeah, it'll have a shelf life of one to two weeks, one to three weeks if you keep it in a cool environment like a refrigerator. Alright, another question about pain ingredients. This is from Deborina Gordon. There are so many types of salts available. Himalayan salts, Dead Sea salts, dender Dendritic. Thank you, dendritic salts. Epsom salts, how do you decide which to use in the different products? There are a lot of different salts available. I've definitely noticed an increase in the amount of salts available in the last decade. It's such an important thing for cooking. You notice there's so many different, pink flake sea salt from Murray River, volcanic ash salt from Hawaii, red ash salt from Hawaii. You notice these huge amounts of flavors in the cooking world. That's really translated down to the bath and body world. We now know there's a lot of salts. At its heart, salt is a salt. In scrubs, the salt is there to mostly provide some manual exfoliation. However, the different salts do have slightly different properties. What that's important for isn't necessarily a product that you're rinsing down the drain. What that's important for is the label and the marketing. When you're using a pink Himalayan sea salt, that sounds so much better than table salt, right? On a scrub, on a label. Ultimately, any of those artesian, beautifully sourced products are going to be better than regular table salt that has been processed within an inch of its life and has all the minerals and nutrients sucked out of it and then has iodine added back into it. Any of these artesian salts have been, generally, the way they harvest them, you guys, is incredible. They take big buckets of water from whatever body of water they're needing the salt from. They bring them to giant, I think tiny little short swimming pools basically. Giant flat areas, they pour the water out. Then they trek back down and do it again. Pour the water until finally they have a lot of water. The sun dries and evaporates out the water, leaving just the beautiful salt crystals. That's why the pink Himalayan sea salt, the black volcanic salt, the red Hawaiian salt, that's one of the reasons you're paying more money for them. A, they have more minerals and nutrients in them. B, they have been lovingly handcrafted just like they did hundreds and thousands of years ago when salt was first discovered. When you're thinking scrubs, be thinking 'what is my end product?' I care about the grain. Is it going on my face? Is it going on my body? Is it going on my feet? You care about the grain. Then be thinking 'what am I doing with this?' Who am I selling it to? Who am I giving it to? Is the label important? Is the price point important? What's the most important thing? Then be designing from there. This fine Himalayan pink sea salt, you could do this with a regular white salt but it wouldn't be nearly as cute. This is very pretty. Would it feel exactly the same in the shower? It'd probably be 80, 90 percent the same. When you're choosing your salt, a lot of it has to do with the marketing, the label appeal to the salt as much as it does as the actual manual exfoliation.