Some of my friends have been asking me why am I giving English names to my soap? There are few reasons. First of all, as a Serbian living in a foreign country, every day I spend in a highly diffused international surrounding where everyone must communicate in English. As many of my loyal supporters and soapy lovers are inevitably from my immediate surrounding, it would be unfair to them to force them to pronounce words with whom they do not have even remotely any connection or understanding. Secondly, a lot of my readers are soapmakers themselves and it is fairly more easy for them to get the first impression about the soap fragrance and message it conveys judging by it's name and physical appearance (photos, packaging). Third reason is even more simple. I usually cannot find an appropriate name in Serbian for a soap I have envisioned and all the Cyrillic typeface I have met so far just take too much space on my label.
I really do my best to write in grammatically accurate English and it pains me that sometimes I do make mistakes. I triple check everything before publishing, but sometimes I am still left to wonder if I could have written a certain passage or description a bit better, more elegant, more eloquent etc. Still, I prefer to write separate posts in English and Serbian as I find bilingual blogs too aesthetically confusing. After all, there is a translator here in the corner and everyone can read every post in their preferred language with just one click.
I even considered to translate very post in English, but that would take too much valuable time and honestly, I simply do not have that fast mind set of a professional translator. Serbian is much different that Anglo-Saxon languages and once I shift into thinking and speaking in English, I cannot make fast transitions back into Serbian. To make the situation even more complicated, I am speaking more of Dutch lately, and for the sake of my profession, daily I have to deal with Italian, French and German. Sometimes even Latin, Spanish, Czech and Russian.
As you can see, I really have to keep language focus on track.
Sometimes I have a feeling that a certain soapy creation simply cannot be described in Serbian as good as in English. This is exactly the case with the latest soap you see here. Furthermore, what I love about English is that there sometimes are several ways to write something and generally to play a bit with spelling. In Slavic languages, that is absolutely impossible. I planned to name this soap Berr
Ylicious, but somehow overlooked the I on my label sheet and by the time I got it from the printer it was too late to change anything. But I did check and it seems to be possible to spell Berr
Ilicious with an i. So instead of stressing myself, I decided to keep this name. Sometimes you really have to let things go.
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| The Name Says it All |
I
love berries and I
love grapes, although I generally do not find fragrance oils to be
really realistic to the actual fruit. But I don't mind. Long time ago I have given up on predicting the how will people react on a certain fragrance and could I predict their preference somehow. As I am a hobbyst and sell my soaps only to be able to re-invest into buying more supplies and making more soaps, I do not really have a vast market that can be translated in huge numbers and give some impressive statistic data. So basically I love to buy things to try out. Fragrances that I thin I would like, fragrances that I think my friends would like or fragrances that intrigue me judging by their notes descriptions.
This one I bought based on rave reviews from other fellow soapers, and I expected it to be fun, but didn't really know if I will like it. When I received this fragrance oil and got a first sniff of it, suddenly I felt like I was 9 years old. It is simply so much fun!
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| Chillin' on the Garden Table |
The fragrance notes include all the berries you could possibly think of. A bunch of juicy blueberries, some ripe raspberries, spicy juniper berries in the background, a hint of plums, and abundant of grapes, grapes of all sorts. That's what my nose picks up the most and that's why I said it makes me feel like a little girl. When I was about 9 or 10, it was very in vogue in my school for girls to collect fragrant papers from little blocks. We would carry every day huge albums with hundreds of pieces of this small papers all with different designs and we use to swap during our lunch brakes. I think I still have some of these albums back at my home in Belgrade, but I haven't looked at them for almost 20 years now! Well, this fragrance reminds me on those days and the conjured smell of all those smelly papers.
It reminded me that I love grape fragrances. Let them be unrealistic, but they will definitely put a smile on your face. They seem to diffuse this aura of optimism and therefore, I would say they are perfect for a shower on every day. Next to the smiling, it may even make you want to sing, without even noticing it!
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| I stamped this one up side down! |
I wasn't really sure about the design and I have several options, but somehow a berry-themed soap demands a some round shape to reminds us of, well of berries. There's no fuss here and as you can see the soap is two-colored with soap balls in different colors of some scraps and soap shavings I had on hand. This of course means that the next batch will be with some other soap balls. I
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| A Hidden Pink Ball of Soap |
In this formula I have paired olive oil and Shea butter with lanolin so it will grantee a lovely, creamy & conditioning bar. Let me know what you think about it!
Ingredients: Virgin Olive Oil, H2O, Coconut oil, NaOH, Rice Bran Oil, Castor Oil, Shea Butter, Sweet Almond Oil, Avocado Oil, Lanolin, Fragrance Oil, Natural Pigments, Jojoba Beads.
