A rundown: Soaps By Naiad I Have Loved

I've mentioned before that Naiad Soap Arts is my favorite soap shop on Etsy (possibly my favorite soap shop anywhere; it'd be tough to pick between Naiad and Villainess). But I haven't really talked about Soaps By Naiad I Have Loved. So let me run you through a list of them...



There's the Banana Brulee Soap, for starters. This was my first soap order from Naiad, and it smelled AMAZING. Like the best kind of banana cake, wrapped up in a smooth soapy package. This was the first time I'd ever sniffed my soap while washing my hands, and the tendency to get soap bubbles on my nose continues to this day.



This one is the Chocolate Coffee Scrubby bar, which got compliments from Grant on how good it smelled when I started using it. (He liked the banana soap, too!) It was a terrific scrubby soap, but I don't see it in her shop these days -- it may have been replaced by her Coffee Bean Soap, which isn't as scrubby but may be better for sensitive areas.

After I'd tried those, I lucked into a set of the Chocolate Mint Soap Bars:




which look like nothing so much as gigantic Andes mints, and which are so soft and smooth and smell so awesome that I immediately realized I should never, ever be without them. I have a stash of five bars in my house right now, but I'm pretty sure I'll be using these for as long as she cares to make them. :)

When I made my first order from Naiad, I got a free sample of Blood Orange Soap:



Somewhere in my past I had some kind of soap that was blood orange scented, because when I smell this, I think "Soap!" This may seem like a silly thing to think -- it IS soap! -- but with the banana and the chocolate and the mint, I've always thought "cake!" or "coffee!" or "candy!", not "soap!" All I can think of is that it's like Palmolive -- it smells just like cilantro, therefore when I taste cilantro, I think "Soap!" -- and somewhere in my past, I had a blood orange scented soap that shaped my thoughts on soap forever.

Leaving that aside, it's a very nice soap, as are all of them. ^_^

Another one of the soaps I've tried and loved is a Spiced Plum Loofah soap -- in the grab bag post, it's center-left. It looks a great deal like the Wintermint Basil Loofah Soap, only imagine it purple instead of green:



I had my doubts about this; all the loofas I've seen on store shelves have been very crunchy and scratchy, and the one time I stayed in a hotel where they gave me one, they also gave me a liquid soap that didn't lather very well on it.

But WOW! The loofah soap is AWESOME. It softens up just enough when I'm using it that it isn't too scratchy, but it provides a really nice-feeling scrub. I'm enjoying the Spiced Plum scent a lot, too. Unfortunately, I can't find any instances on the Etsy shop where this soap has been offered for sale! However, I definitely would try more loofah soaps thanks to this one. :)

The last soap I've got to share is the French Macaron Soap:



The one I tried was the top one, the blue/cream one, which was almond scented. And it smelled Exactly Like An Almond Cookie. It was awesome. :) (I will say, though, that the "cream filling" was not as solid a soap as the "cookie" parts; once it was down to just the filling, it got a little messy.)

And while this isn't a soap, I want to include it anyway, because it is SO GOOD:



It's the Strawberry Lime Lip Balm, which feels wonderful and smells even better. As someone who stashes lip balm in every room of the house, the car, and all the bags I leave the house with, I consider lip balm an essential -- to find one that's this good and works this well is a particular treat. You get about twice as much lip balm as comes in a standard stick-style lip balm, which is even more made of win. Despite the fact that it'd take me a while to get through this one, I went ahead and ordered four more of her lip balms, because OMG SO GOOD -- and hey, variety is the spice of life, or lip balm, whichever.

What with the grab bag I've shown off already, I'll have plenty more Naiad reviews in the future. For now, lemme leave you with the link one more time -- http://naiad.etsy.com -- and say that her stuff ships super-amazing-fast and is always, always worth it. Big fan here!

Naiad's Grab Bag!

Okay, guys, run-don't-walk to Naiad Soap Arts on Etsy, because Erin has a deal going on right now that is Not To Be Missed. It's a soapy grab bag -- 2 lbs of soap for $10 -- and you will honestly not believe what you get in this thing. ^_^ I got eleven different kinds of soap:



all of which I am ridiculously excited about trying!

Naiad is my favorite soap shop on Etsy by a long shot. I'm so excited to get to try so many different kinds of soap! (It's all I can do not to convo her with "So, um, how many of these do you have left? And can I get, like, all of them?" But I really ought to leave some soap for other people! :D)

Seattle Rainwater Soap Company

Seattle Rainwater Soap Company is a local-to-me soap business with a variety of neat-smelling, scrubby soaps. The soaps also feature "real Seattle rainwater", which, unlike someplace like New York, is the kind of thing you might actually want in your soap. ^_^

So far I've tried the following varieties of soap:

Orchard Fruit: Apple/Peach - A bestseller. Not too sweet, with poppyseed for scrub. It was definitely fruity, and it was the soap I could smell the "Seattle rainwater" best in -- it really did smell like an orchard on a rainy day. The poppyseed scrub was a little much for me, though.

Almond Latte: With cocoa butter for creaminess and coffee grounds to exfoliate and remove odors. This one smelled really good out of the packaging, but ended up having an almost... bread-like smell to it in the long run. The coffee grounds were definitely scrubby! It was nice, but not the kind of almond I'm looking for. (I have recently found the almond I'm looking for, and will tell you all about it in an upcoming post.)

Ginger Zest With Lime: Bright and citrusy, with hints of orange, lime, and ginger ale. By far my favorite of the soaps I've tried from them. This is very much a CITRUS!!! soap, with lots of yummy, spicy ginger, too. I'd use it again in a heartbeat. The scrubbiness in this one seems to come from the citrus zest. It isn't a harsh soap in the least, though; it's very nice to the skin.

Like anyone looking for a bargain, I was excited to see that they offer a discounted "odds & ends" bag full of imperfectly-shaped soaps. I may have to give that a try at some point. :)

A small collection of appropriate soaps

Victorian Wedding Cake Soaps by soapychica


Glycerin Wedding Cake by DaisyCakeSoap


Wedding Cake Scented Cupcake Soap by DoctorSweetTooth

Congratulations to Sweetly Scented Lemmings' own Telesilla and her wife Darkrose on the happy day of their marriage! :)