Today’s release features a whopping total of 45 fabulous products, both new and returning, permanent additions and guests. We have spent many months in development, and encountered a wealth of snags and setbacks. This release is a long-time-coming and I am beyond excited to share it with you.

The big deal this month is perfume. That’s right, Villainess original fragrances done up in a darling bottle and a wearable oil blend. We’ve had requests for perfume for, quite literally, years now and have finally hit upon a formula we feel confident releasing. These are the same scents you love in our body products, with very minor adjustments made to accommodate skin chemistry and body warmth. An excerpt from our new category:

We’ve bottled the ephemeral by way of an Extrait: a 29% concentration of aromatics in a carrier blend of long lasting vegetable oils* with a silken afterfeel. Like the same scents you’ve come to love in our body collection, our Extrait exploits a variety of synthetic aroma chemicals, essential oils, plant resins, infusions, extracts and absolutes.

Historically, the ampoule has held the blood of martyrs, anointing oils, and medicinal solutions. We have misappropriated the delicate vials to hold our equally precious Extrait, and carefully accented each stoppered bottle with our hand-stamped monogram and a weathered copper skull. Ampoules, like fragrance, must be broken to deliver their precious contents. While we advise against breaking the necks of our ampoules, we find the symmetry of function deeply appealing.

This perfume development has been absolutely thrilling for me, and has really let me rediscover the nuances I love about each and every one of our scents. I hope you all love them as much as I do!

Continue reading "All The Winter Dirt on Villainess"

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We are officially pleased to announce the release of our Black Label collection for fall. This chilling change of season has left us all nostalgic, so we’ve taken things back to basics with a couple of old faces and a simpler format. No Smooch!, no Whipped! just that classic, silken Villainess soap.

Mudslide - A positively filthy mix of day-old coffee grounds and vetyver, blackened hazelnut, sweet graham, and rich cream. - One of our debut soaps, Mudslide was discontinued due to scent-boredom. This revamped formulation features terracotta boulders for texture and a lighter sprinkling of exfoliating coffee grounds.

Strychnine - Ripe peaches and green apples spiked with a menacing hint of cinnamon and ginger, sweetened with tobacco and underscored with burning oak and earth. - Another one of our debut soaps, Strychnine’s blend of spicy apples and peaches was not super-innovative. We’ve added plenty of ginger, tobacco, burning leaves and earth making it completely appropriate for fall and altogether original. If you loved it the first time, you’ll fall in love all over again.

Moral Decay - Honey sweet, smoky lapsang souchong tea, brewed too strong and liberally debauched with aniseed, ginger, cinnamon, bergamot and gentian. - Originally appeared as a disaster-soap - a complete failure of a batch that smelled beautifully. We’ve brought it back, this time as a successful batch, and added a dollop of honey for sweetness.

Shrapnel - Sugared cranberries laced with ozone and incense and spiked with cracked peppercorns. - This season’s experiment tiptoes on a tightrope between fruity and metallic, and has an underlying sweetness that puts us in mind of a Pink Pyromania.

Our collection draws on old fall favourites - earth, burning leaves, cinnamon, cranberry and warm teas - and tosses them in the deep-end with a wealth of jarring notes. No less than you’d expect from Villainess.

Speaking of the unexpected, I won’t be a bit surprised if each and every one of you reports a week’s worth of tedious, little snafus. Communication gaffs, absentee cell-phones, failed reservations, vehicular inconvenience… Shall I go on? You see, last week, on the 25th of September, the planet Mercury suffered an apparent reversal in its orbit. These reversals, retrogrades, happen occasionally to all the planets (from our limited, geocentric POV). Astrologically speaking, a retrograde generally corresponds to a similar reversal of that planet’s area of expertise. Trying to make forward motion under these circumstances can be trying. We’ve anticipated your needs (because you know, we’re awesome that way). Retrograde is our fragrance for reversals - all reversals. This is only our second perfume oil release, and the first to be made available in anything like salable quantities. Let me elaborate:

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.

Retrograde is designed to celebrate the general notion of reversal, planetary or otherwise. Go with the flow, because afterall, every undertaking can benefit from a moment of reflection. If you can’t make forward progress, there’s nothing wrong with backtracking a bit.

In other (fabulous) news, local customers? Now you can browse the Villainess line in person! No, we haven’t opened our doors boutique style - we’ve done one better… Three Chicks Designz offers a really stunning selection of designer decor and high-end gifts. They’re my personal supplier for Tyler and Voluspa candles, among many others. Villainess plus? We can’t top that. We are beyond excited to work with an incredible local retailer and truly pleased to send you their direction! When you’re in Waverly, check out Three Chicks at 100 East Acres Avenue.

Stay tuned! We’ll be back in November with a truly gift-able selection of winter goodies. What are we planning? Your seasonal favourites, a few hot cuppas, and a handful of dalliances in perfumery!

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We’ve reached a fairly significant milestone here at Villainess, and I’m pleased to invite you all to share it with us. The end of August marks our 5th year in business, and the time has truly flown by. With 5 full years behind us I, for one, am good and ready to celebrate. And, it’s only fitting to share this celebration with the people who’ve made it possible - our addicted fiercely fabulous customers!

I’ve been kicking this idea around for a couple of months now - you might have read my rambling if you keep an eye on our blog. I was so excited about this that I couldn’t keep it under wraps completely. Our birthday cake is a ridiculously delicious trifle that toys with the idea of rights, rites, and memorials - potential made manifest and commemorated.

Birth Rite - Layer cake. Lightly spiced with cinnamon and ginger, frosted with berries, and grounded with a resinous skin-sent - precious amber, sweet myrrh, tonka bean and peppercorn.

So, everyone gets a slice of our cake! And, to make this a proper birthday blowout, we’re staging a 3-Day Storewide 25% Off Sale. Seriously. The sale starts now, and lasts until 5:00 Central/Standard on September 1st, 2008. You will need to enter the code BDAY25 in the coupon code field during checkout to cash in your discount.

Finally, in an unusual move for us, we’ve posted our remaining stock of Quick or Dead? perfume on eBay! I have a hard time making small quantities, no lie. And since this isn’t a release of proper proportions, we decided to give everyone a chance at the bottles by way ofa a good old-fashioned auction.

Much thanks, to each of you, for making this a postively thrilling adventure. I couldn’t have custom-ordered a friendlier, more-awesome customer base - you guys have made the last 5 years truly rewarding. Enjoy!

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We are pleased to, finally, present you with the summer’s most anticipated collaboration. After much delay and without further ado, we bring you…

Villainess Loves Possets! (part 3).

Fabienne and I have been brainstorming, scheming, and plotting the best possible pairing of Possets and Villainess for summer. In the end, we settled on Indigo and Titanium White.

I have a deep, abiding love for Lavender, and no one does it quite so well as Fabienne. Possets offers crisp, cool, smooth, sweet, chocolately, spicy, sugary, bright, light and dark versions of the blossom, but Indigo is my absolute favourite. This is a deep, dark, barely sweetened pool of lavender satin that’s perfect for diving into on a sultry day. We’ve done this up in the usual wonderful Whipped, and a deep blue Smooch! loaded with blueberries and jojoba beads.

By contrast, Titanium White, is crisp, clean and bright. An eye-opening show-stopper of big, white florals and clean linens - all the vibrant intensity of summer distilled into an unadulterated white. I love this Whipped! for a subtle whiff of sophistication all day long, and the Smooch! is ideal for maintaining the tan this fragrance makes me wish I had!

The “Possets by Villainess” Collection is, as always, a limited edition affair. All products are available on a “while supplies last” basis, so be sure to snag yours post-haste. And… that’s all the news from Villainess!

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I am pleased to announce our much anticipated summer release! We bring you four fabulous Black Label collections, each an exemplary display of nuanced fragrance, sublime texture and ultimate indulgence. To elaborate:

Continue reading "Black Label Edition"

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Give us your inflamed, your infected,
Your comedogenic pores yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your seething t-zone.
Send these, the cystic, acid-shocked, to us:
We lift a marshy hand beside a mossy swamp.

With this modest addition to the general catalog, we bring you Grundy Mud. Grundy really requires little introduction from me - our mossy brigade of Grundy Gals have done a fair job of proseletysing earth, dirt, and the loamy way. But this Mud? Demands that I elaborate…Like all Mud products, this is the all-natural reduction of a fabulous concept into its most essential components. It’s designed for its therapeutic value, and not its fragrance. We’ve started with a blend of French Clay (to draw oils), Bentonite Clay (to draw toxins) and activated Charcoal (to cleanse), and then proceeded with botanicals; feverfew, goldenseal and nettles (to reduce inflamation), marshmallow to soften, and nutrient rich algae, lettuce and parsley. And the essential oils? Antibacterial myrrh, patchouli to tone skin, vetiver to regulate oil production (and soothe your acne-agitation - bad skin is hell on the disposition), and Roman Chamomile to reduce inflammation. Separately, these oils are brilliant. Together? Unstoppable. This is my new Favourite Thing to Slather on My Face, and I hope you enjoy it!

As an added bonus, we’re now stocking the much requested Ginger Snapped Whipped! and Datura Whipped! to put the final tropical touch on your summer.

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I am pleased to announce that Villainess is now offically re-opened! We’ve spent the last 3 months meticulously tweaking, reformulating, reformmatting and generally overhauling the entire line from head-to-toe. It’s been an exhausting labour of love, and I only hope you enjoy the results as much as I do. What’s changed?

An all new website! Not only does the new site look fabulous, but it functions better than ever. Our streamlined checkout process makes it easy to see all your info at a glance - verify billing and shipping addresses, review your order, and select a shipping method all on one page. The best part? It’s no longer difficult to send a gift, and you won’t have trouble getting that old shipping address revised.
We have opted not to import your old user account(s) because of the high incidence of “stuck” shipping addresses. But the new system allows you to check out w/out an account, so you’re welcome to avoid the registration process completely if you’d prefer. We will be maintaining your old records, should you ever need to access your order history.

A brand new Villainess Blog! The ‘blog will mirror/archive The Dirt newsletter and feature skincare musings, e-tailer recs, and product reviews. Well, as soon as I get a chance to do some writing!

Revised formulas! We’ve given Decadence and Datura a minor tweak towards improvement, stripped all traces of FD&C colourants from our formulas, and revised each and every Smooch! with a luxe blend of oils (Cherry Kernel and Coconut to match our Whipped! blend) and a stiff dose of Tocopherols to extend their already-long shelf-life.

Gorgeous new packaging! Our product labelling is a sleek as the new site, and I am in love with our new clear-as-glass jars and metal lids. These jars are incredibly reusable, so we hope you take measures to reduce waste by keeping them around for your small bits and baubles. Bonus? Datura Slick! now features a shower-safe plastic bottle and much-requested pump!

Revised formulas, yes! First, Absinthe is now discontinued it. Once we hit a certain point in the fragrance development process, I couldn’t bring myself to commit to an accurate Absinthe impersonation. That, combined with the fact that another awesome soapmaker does a fabulous Absinthe treatment in soap… Well, our blend became a little extraneous. So, we’ve revised our basic formula. The essential cucumber, grass and vermouth blend is totally pimped out w/ a dizzy whiff of violets and plumb. This new cucumber soap is called Chloroform and is amazingly like the real thing.

Decadence now includes a touch of tonka bean and coconut milk to lend some depth to that deep bourbon vanilla. To celebrate it’s renewal we’ve finally delivered a Decadence Whipped! that I hope you love. And Datura! We’ve revisited our process, revised the formula, and finally found that we really can get that delectable floral to last in soap format. We bring you Datura soap - gardenia, plumeria, pikaki, tuberose and frangipani.

Finally, we need to give huge props to our brilliant designer. Much love, Kira! Not only do you have the patience of a saint, and mad, mad skillz, you are a consummate professional. I thank you for your generosity, and for putting your creative genius to work for us!

And… that’s all she wrote! Check back next month for our Summer Edition Limiteds - we’re bringing back some much-requested old favourites!

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Just a quick note! We are, in fact, still holding a closeout sale! We don’t have much left in the way of stock, but the discount is up to 40% with the code CLOSEOUT40.

What we do have, is a much requested run of Indiscreet Whipped and a bit of Indiscreet Smooch! to match.

Continue reading "Closeout Sale - Pt 2"

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Hello!

This afternoon I announce the 3rd in Villainess’s very limited history of sales. The discount code is CLOSEOUT20 - when you’re shopping, before you check out, plug that in the Discount Coupon field and it’ll take 20% off your Entire. Order. Seriously.

Continue reading "Closeout Sale"

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Hello!!

Well! This update is a long time coming! For some reason, I’d decided that this would be a small update since I new we were only doing a limited run of 4 scents. And then, in the last week, getting this udpate prepped has been a gargantuan process. I completely overlooked the fact that we’re releasing (or re-releasing) 17 new products! And here I thought I was just slacking. So, let me tell you about these wonderful products, because all said, I am super excited about them.

Continue reading "The Dirt on Villainess"

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Vil·lain·ess \ 'vi-lən-nəs \ n : a woman who is a villain

Vil·lain·ess \ 'vi-lən-nəs \ n
1 : an uncanny, articulate woman
2 : a deliberate antagonist or tease
3 : an intelligent woman in a tabloid or gossip
4 : the fall-girl in a particularly difficult situation

Villainess. Redefining "bad."