Just a quick update to tide us all over in these hot summer months. We’ve been peaking at 100 degrees here at Villainess HQ, and thought we could all use a crisp, cool summer skin-scent. It’s a perfect opportunity to collaborate with one of our favourite perfumeries - The Scent of Angels in both a delicate, gold-swirled, skin-softening Smooch! and our perfect-year-round, light ‘n fluffy Whipped!. I think it turned out beautifully, and look forward to our next collusion!

And, apparently I’ve got a cake hangup. Which, my nutritionist wouldn’t find surprising. So, while this is no Birth Rite layer cake of d00m, Trifling is yummy, no less.

“Blackberry buttermilk sponge cake - soaked in a fruit tissane, spiced with cumin and filled with an apricot compote.”

For this go ‘round, I broke out the cake pans round molds and actually layered these fruity concoctions, so you’ll receive a perfect triangular slice (serving dish not included ).

The single-most fabulous development this month is our long-awaited SAMPLES! We’ve had countless requests to make our sample sizes available for retail consumption, but’ve juggled a few logistical concerns - inventory, packaging, production - the usual. We’ve finally got that sorted, so we opened them up on the site last week for a test run. Seems to be working fine! We’ll be rotating bitty sizes from our general catalog of Soap, Smooch & Whipped products, and those sizes are priced comparable to their bigger counterparts. Orders consisting of nothing-but sample sizes are not eligible for our existing Freebie policy, but we will be happy to extend our “Free Shipping over $100” offer. We’ve had an equal amount of requests for perfume samples, and we’re working on it. See the above re: logistics. ;)

This update requires very little commentary - we’ve already spoiled half of it in the Villainess Blog! For those of you not following along, allow me to recap… Sidewalk is a rare experiement in ozone and earth. “Hot concrete drenched in sunshowers. Summer melons, limeades and fresh-cut grass.” “Fresh” is a slightly pedestrian concept for Villainess. I mean, it’s just not what we do. So I really enjoyed the reinvention process, and the chance to infuse “fresh” with warmth and sweetness and a wealth of summer smells from my childhood.

Killer Treez, on the other hand… “The bleeding sap of a thousand fallen conifers covered in maple syrup. “ This one sprang from a hypothetical soap we discussed on the forums. Instead of using maple syrup like we speculated, I loaded this with pine tar - a supersticky, astringent, old-skool cure all. Supposed to be fab for psoriasis and various skin conditions. Anyways, it smells like you slaughtered an x-mas tree in a cedar closet and then polished off a short stack covered in maple syrup. Needless to say, I’m pleased.

The Pipevine Swallowtail is one of those big North American birds you see in summer. Not as classic as the Monarch, but just as elegant. The caterpillars like to nosh on (surprise) Pipevines so they make for a nasty poisonous mouthful for unsuspecting predators. Adults bear big orange eyespots on their wings as “don’t eat me” advertisement. My interpretation consists of: “Aromatic basil and bitter tomato leaf in an ephemeral haze of neroli and tangerine.”

All 3 scents are available in our fabulous Soap format, and will be ready to ship by June 4th.

Additionally, we’re happy to introduce the first of (hopefully many) the new Villainess votive candles. Burn! appears in Black Label high-form in our 2 new favourite scents - Pipevine Swallowtail and Sidewalk. Not terribly different from our well-loved Tarts, Burn! features a similar blend of strongly-scented soywax and paraffin, but with an all-cotton (lead free!) low-smoke wick. I have really enjoyed these in my home - containers are, well, self-contained and sometimes less-fussy than tarts. Of course, candle smoke typically irritates my allergies, so I was pleasantly surprised to discover that these are virtually fume-free! I sincerely hope you enjoy them, and look forward to stocking some of our general catalog scents.

Other additions include the (blogged about) Mud Sampler! (which features a teaser of our soon-to-be-released Crushed Mud!), and The Dad-Pack. Dad’s our notoriously hard to shop for, and with Father’s Day around the corner, we thought we might give you an extra option. Our most-macho soaps in Antihero and Byzantium, a little Ennui Whipped! (unscented, so no one will realise they need moisturising), and a wee sample of Grundy Smooch! (our effort towards enabling the exfoliant-resistant).

We are running a little late this month (plenty of shenanigans with facial care prototypes) - this was actually intended to be our May release, with a small summer-revisitation in July. We are still making plans for our July release (we’ve had multiple inquiries about Trauma - and yes, it’s coming back!), and should have at least part of our facial line ready for release shortly. Keep an eye on our blog for all the latest news!

I’ve had a soft spot for Lepidoptera for a long time now. I can date most of it back the reading A Girl of the Limberlost as an impressionable adolescent, but the wee birds themselves are the only explanation for my continued fascination. Butterflies are gorgeous creatures - delicate feats of aeronautics and sturdy gossamer wings. Few things are anywhere near as inspiring.

So when I designed a fragrance, composed of equal parts sweetness and indol, bitterness and vegetation, I reached for my Field Guide to settle on a namesake.

The Pipevine Swallowtail is one of those big North American birds you see in summer. Not as classic as the Monarch, but just as elegant. The caterpillars like to nosh on (surprise) Pipevines so they make for a nasty poisonous mouthful for unsuspecting predators. Adults bear big orange eyespots on their wings as “don’t eat me” advertisement. My interpretation consists of: “Aromatic basil and bitter tomato leaf in an ephemeral haze of neroli and tangerine.”

This is a really simple creme-coloured soap, no additives, just swirled with Brambleberry’s Amethyst Purple Mica. You generally see mica’s in mineral makeup compounds, used to tint transparent melt’n pour soaps, or in lip glosses; applications that provide a lot of light play and shimmer so you can really see the colours. I use them a lot to dust the creamy surface of my soap slabs, but will swirl them throughout an opaque soap as well. The end result isn’t quite as striking, but provides a burnt marbling of colour through the log that I really enjoy.

In this instance, I also polished the top of the soap using a pair of cheap powder brushes from the drugstore and more Brambleberry Mica’s. Another touch of Amethyst Purple blended into Cornflower Blue blended into Lustre Black to capture the shimmering blue-black of the Swallowtail’s wing. I debated how truly I wanted to mimic the colour scheme (honestly, if I’d planned better, I’d have shadowed the entire soap with an Australian Black Clay and ivory swirls), and ultimately decide to use the Copper Sparkle in place of the orange eyespots. We don’t keep an orange mica in house, so I improvised a bit.

The final bars don’t capture the entire colour scheme, despite my strategic polish job, so I wanted to share the uncut slab. This is probably my new favourite scent - the tomato leaf is intriguing, and plays with neroli in ways I didn’t really expect. And the basil? Very quiet for such a pungent herb.

Not too shabby, right?

In a previous entry I mentioned that we were working on a small, mostly-soap Black Label release because I’ve got my production team up to their elbows with our “facial stuff.” So, the soaps are curing, should be available shortly, and I thought I’d share a preview of these bad boys.

For now, Sidewalk & Killer Treez:

Sidewalk is a rare experiement in ozone and earth. “Hot concrete drenched in sunshowers. Summer melons, limeades and fresh-cut grass.” “Fresh” is a slightly pedestrian concept for Villainess. I mean, it’s just not what we do. So I really enjoyed the reinvention process, and the chance to infuse “fresh” with warmth and sweetness and a wealth of summer smells from my childhood.

Killer Treez, on the other hand… “The bleeding sap of a thousand fallen conifers covered in maple syrup. “ This one sprang from a hypothetical soap we discussed on the forums. Instead of using maple syrup like we speculated, I loaded this with pine tar - a supersticky, astringent, old-skool cure all. Supposed to be fab for psoriasis and various skin conditions. Anyways, it smells like you slaughtered an x-mas tree in a cedar closet and then polished off a short stack covered in maple syrup. Needless to say, I’m pleased.

One (or two) more soaps to preview - gotta clean up pics and gather my thoughts.

AKA, “Needful Things.”

I was pretty flattered when the guys at Rue Morgue gave me a buzz. But when I sneaked a peek at the feature? The word is officially “stoked.”