Every year, I am newly surprised to find that our birthday (On August 14th) has come and gone. The sad, delightful fact, is that we don’t have a lot of time to stop for milestones. The new developments, and fabulous fanbase that have kept us going for seven years also keep us too busy to stage a proper retrospective. It’s a daily celebration, another opportunity to do something we love, for people who love what we do. So, happy birthday! Seven years, and tons o’ soap later, we’re still delighted to bring you the bizarre indulgences you adore!

To celebrate, we’ve made our favourite confection… Birth Rite! Layer cake. Lightly spiced with cinnamon and ginger, frosted with berries, and grounded with a resinous skin-scent - precious amber, sweet myrrh, tonka bean and peppercorn. We’ve got our classic Polka Dot Soap, and the lucious, silken Whipped!. Extrait so your fresh-baked scent can last all day, and our triple-decker Smooch! done up in extra-rich layers of incense, spicecake and fresh berry icing. And then, for added deliciousness, the Birth Rite Lite Smack! Layers of Incense, Buttercream Cupcake and Spicetrade, topped with a scoop of Berry Patch stars as this month’s Staff Pick.

For this round, Birth Rite is available from all the usual suspects. And I strongly suspect that we won’t be celebrating my own birthday in March with Birth Rite, so we’ll be extending the run of the Soap item through September, and a bit into October (depending upon stock). Feel free to snag a few extra bars!

Other new developments? August’s Summer Sweet Smack! got very little publication, but it’s probably… one of my top 5 combos, to date. It is A chic selection of Bluegrass, Raspberry Plum, Georgia Peach and light Vanilla Bean. And I’ll probably be using this one year-round. Another late-summer treat, Peachberry Custard Soap, Summer’s late peaches and berry preserves sunk into a sweet, heavy custard filling. This is easily more custard than peachberry, but the fruity bits add a nice light, freshness to the otherwise oversweet goo.

Another season, another fit of retrograde Mercury. Provided you haven’t already lost all your pertinent details, you may enjoy our recurring Retrograde Extrait - a lovely perfume oil of Seamless layers of incense and earth - amber, oppopanax, sandalwood, egyptian musk, old oakmoss - sweetened with tonka and black vanilla. Clarifying Bulgarian lavender, a black haze of orchid, osmanthus and narcissus and a jolt of raw black pepper and clary sage. .

And speaking of Extrait, we are pleased to introduce the entire catalog in sample format. You’re welcome to select a Six Pack of 1 ml vials (done up in signature Villainess style) of your choice, or purchase the gift-boxed 27 Scent Sampler and experience the entire line in a single glorious act of fragrant self-indulgence. We won’t judge you, in any event. These sample sizes have been much-requested, and are long awaited, so we hope you all enjoy them as much as we do!

Many thanks for 7 awesome years!

B

After the summer we’ve had, I can’t think of a better time to spotlight our next reseller…

We’ve been working with The Soap Box Company since… 2006? A long time, at any rate. And every single restock and collaboration has been an absolute pleasure.

I wish I could remember why we started working on Lehua, but all I recall was devising a light summer floral that also satisfied my pre-occupation with Volcano Honey. “Big white blossoms - pikaki, tuberose, lily and narcissus - honeyed with sweet Hawaiian ginger.” The interpretation of Lehua blooms is a little subjective - largely because a Hawaiian “R&D trip” wasn’t in our budget. But we wanted to service the notion of the indulgent tropical floral, by way of similar native blooms, while evoking the sweetness that makes the Lehua blossom such a bee-friendly flower. The florals in this concoction are a little more sharp than sweet - bright and crisp - muted with an almost cloying honey (not even remotely indolic) spiked with ginger.

I think my favourite application was the Lehua Smooch!.

We used a slightly less exotic (but equally humectant/indulgent) clover honey, accented with coral micas, and Mono¨ de Tahiti oil in our Body Conditioning Smooch! to create a beautifully soothing concoction.

The Soap was a bit trickier as the honey component tends to discolour, and I wanted to keep at least a suggestion of pinkness. Easily solved by concentrating the honey in the uppermost layers of soap.

Lehua is also available as a beautifully conditioning Whipped!.

Hoarfrost is another summer favourite, originally conceived as a compliment to The SBC’s First Frost exclusive (a frozen vanilla floral). “Summer’s late berry harvest - raspberries, blueberries, currants and strawberries - bittersweet with vanilla and arrested by an icy touch of eucalyptus and peppermint.” It originally debuted the fall of 07 as an icy winter scent, but I believe it’s spent more time as a summer-feature than anything. And rightly so, as it has all the sweetness of fruity scents with the perfect dose of cool.

This Soap continues to be one of my favourites. High contrast pink on white marbles beautifully, and then we garnish the top with a frosty white mica.

One of the fun parts of the really cool minty/mentholated scents, is that they have a genuine cooling effect. Not so much in the soaps, and less in the lightly-scented Whipped!, but it’s definitely present in the berry-soaked Smooch!. Perfect for a post-workout shower!

Now, I can’t swear to availability, but I suspect both scents are around in August’s Free Stuff if you want to take a look at The Soap Box Company.

Typically, a new product release would go via an edition of The Dirt on Villainess. But since we’ve got a minor Black Label release planned for the end of the month, we didn’t want to spam your inbox. And this is a general catalog update, so it’s not like it’s time sensitive!

Let me cut to the chase here… Much demanded, long awaited, perfume samples!

That’s our pick-six sampler, and we’ve also done the entire collection in a 27 Sample Giftbox so you can experience the entire line in one go.

August’s Staff Pick Smack! is light and sweet - refreshingly bright for these dogdays o’ summer. Summersweet is A chic selection of Bluegrass, Raspberry Plum, Georgia Peach and light Vanilla Bean.

Stay tuned for slightly more verbose commentary on our perfume release, and a brief update before we’re done with summer altogether!

Our next reseller spotlight is accompanied by a delightful edition to the Villainess catalog (sort of). But first, the scents!

We began working with Brittany from Poshbrats in mid-2008 and were so taken with the concept that it wasn’t long before we were inspired to design a couple of suitable exclusive scents. After all, “life’s little luxuries are indeed necessities!”. What could better serve the Villainess Indulgence Credo?

The concept breakdown (into P&B) wasn’t super-original, but I loved working with the chic sophistication of Posh versus the indulgent (slightly juvenile) sweetness of Brats. So Posh is A rich heart of dragon’s blood resin, white peach, and crushed pomegranate washed with sheer plumeria and lightly spiced with sarsaparilla. Blending fruits with resins is a near-signature Villainess shtick, but for good reason. The right resin, paired with the right fruit, can yield a light, lasting skin-scent. Posh is no exception, and by using a slightly-floral Dragon’s Blood resin we create a beautiful opportunity to fuse it with the slightly-fruity plumeria. And then sarsaparilla is a very flexible “spice.” It’s spice notes open the perfume with a light bite - perfect top-notes - but it’s earthy woodiness provides a dirtiness that ties it all back into that resinous base. Add a succulent shot of peach, and Posh rockets into my top 10.

Posh got done up as a soap, in a beautiful shade of royal purple garnished with gold at Brittany’s suggestion…

… And appears in our Whipped! and Extrait products, as well as a Smooch! scrub (sugar drenched in peach syrup - ridiculous).

Brats is a fusion of two distinctly different families of sweets - hard candies versus sticky candies - Ribbon candy spliced with butterscotch, salted caramels and a resinous melange of sticky sweets. I suppose butterscotch technically qualifies as a hard candy, but we’re working with a gooier toffied version and… well, it smells sticky. The hard candies in this concoction are old fashioned, general store barrels of ribbon candies and barber-pole sticks, fruits spliced with rosewater. Since we’d already included the gold and purple from the Poshbrats logo, we had to get a blushing pink in this soap. Of course, all those sweets will inevitably turn a cold-process soap shades of caramel, so we just extended the ribbon candy concept into the visual component:

While I adore a stripey soap, the Brats Smooch! is probably my favourite application of the scent, as it’s perfectly accented by 4 different sugars.

And then, the Whipped! and Extrait aren’t too shabby.

One of the real pleasures of working with Brittany has been a shared vision - indulgent body products gone global. So establishing Poshbrats as a reliable, UK/EU based reseller? A brilliant way around ever-increasing shipping charges, and prohibitive/fluctuating exchange rates. Transatlantic inconvenience goes both ways, and we are hella pleased to make both Posh & Brats scents available to stateside customers for the foreseeable future!

This should be the first of several entries featuring the exclusive scents we’ve designed for our fabulous resellers. It occurred to me that fans who are new to Villainess, or who haven’t had reason to give our resellers a try, might be completely unaware of some truly essential scents. And, if these are old favourites of yours, maybe you’ll want to give them a try again.

When we design scents for our resellers, the process can vary. Sometimes we collaborate - we work with suggestions and requests from a given scent family (gourmand, floral, citrus, etc.). In other instances, resellers are kind enough to trust me, and we hook them up with whatever latest concoction is lurking around in R&D stage. Black Out was one of the latter, so when we first discussed designing exclusives for Magical Omaha (the Scent Addict’s predecessor) I was thrilled that Cindy seemed just as excited about the concept as I was.

Black Out is Dark cocoa and oppoponax, blackened with patchouli, cyanide and a breath of aniseed. Inspired by a ridiculous chocolate and almond layer cake, this scent manages to hit all my fragrant-weak-spots. The chocolate is very dark, and grounded with a dry patchouli, so it doesn’t really evoke a sense of the gourmand. Since the sweetness comes from the almond and oppoponax it dances a sort of borderline sickly-sweet. A little more anti-freeze sweet than dessert, yeah? Black Out also marks the first of my obsession with oppoponax. I’ve cultivated an abiding fondness for sweet myrrh, and frankly it’s a struggle not to spike everything with it.

The “breath” of aniseed puts off more potential fans than anything, but we promise - it really is a mere “breath.” Since Black Out was originally composed for Soap format, it was an easy matter to accent each bar with a beautiful aniseed star…

…for a mere suggestion of sharpness. Of course, no aniseed essential oil makes its way into the blend, so other products (like the matching Whipped!) actually get short-changed in re: to licorice!

The Black Out Smooch! is another favourite that exemplifies everything I love about the Body Conditioning format. It’s perfectly smooth, a creamy balm accented with a single aniseed star, and then at the bottom, a luscious paste of crushed almonds and cocoa. It’s barely exfoliating and an almost completely pointless exercise in indulgence.

Find Black Out at Magical Omaha or the Scent Addict in Soap, Smooch!, Whipped! and Perfume Oil formats.

For our part, we’re happy to feature Black Out Smack!. This one is composed of Two scoops of Incense sweetened with Chocolate Mousse and Honey Nut. and it does a fair job of evoking the original blend. While the Officially Sanctioned Blend uses two scoops of Incense (since the single note runs a little light) you could easily sub one with an extra scoop of Chocolate Mousse or get a little more accurate/adventurous with a scoop of Unearthed.