Hello friends,

I am once again here to yap about my favorite things because Hot People Don’t Gatekeep™️ so the saying goes.

This one will be about some of the beauty/personal products I buy all the time. None of these are sponsored, I don’t honestly have the time to take affiliate codes these days though there are some places I’d die to have one. 😆 I’m just talking about these because I love them and want to share some cool stuff with other people.

Especially since I sometimes get asked where I buy stuff from for gifts and the like. I used to be really into indie bath and body and perfume products when I was younger, so I know a lot of the makers/stores/products still.

So without any further thought spirals, here we are:

Athame + Alchemy

A gorgeous pic of A+A’s salt bars on her website.

A+A makes the best salt bars, really good rice milk shampoo bars, and has some really nice wax melts and scrubs.

My orders are usually just salt bars or shampoo bars in all honesty because they’re what I use the most. Plus my roommate was very smell sensitive, so we couldn’t have most things burning in the house or if my scrub scent was too strong she’d complain. A+A does have some fantastic powerhouse scents, but I stopped buying the scrubs for that reason and not anything to do with the scrubs themselves. My absolute favorite salt bar scent is Attack of the Killer Tomato1 but Midsummer2 is also incredibly good and I used that one for a couple of months. There are a few others I like but I’m here to talk about faves!

My favorite rice milk shampoo bar is Strawberry Milk scented, but the Rosemary scent is my second favorite. I think she’s had newer scents recently but I haven’t gotten to try any of them yet since I use these most when I’m traveling, unfortunately I haven’t taken a trip this year because work had a lot of emergencies and urgent things to take care of, plus I had health issues and surgery going on so I couldn’t travel for a good portion of this year. Hopefully next year will be better on the health front, at least.

TAT is pretty good, A+A is a one woman show as far as I know so things usually take a few weeks to ship out. That’s pretty standard for indie bath products and I’ve never had a problem with her re: shipping or anything showing up wrong.

Moonalisa

Okay so, Moonalisa is where I need y’all to bear with me. Her products are always late, notoriously so. Her TAT has been like three months before, so there are a lot of people that refuse to buy from her or wait that long. I get it, and if long TATs and zero communication about it are a dealbreaker for you this is not the shop to buy from. I still do, because it ends up being a present to myself when I completely forget about it and it shows up months later neatly packed and smelling divine.

If you have smell sensitive people in your house, this is probably also not the best shop for you because some of her items are strong.

However, I do have to say that Lisa is a cancer survivor and has a lot of health complications from that, so that contributes to the extra time. Her stuff is witchy and fun, so if that’s your vibe her items are great to try out.

I’ve liked her lip balms, I used to buy one of her roomspray scents consistently because it was just that good. The aforementioned roommate complained (she apparently hates incense) so I started using a spray in my personal office at work since my officemate also liked and was obsessed with it. That scent is Fortune Teller3. The description is fairly accurate, my officemate calls it “the goth peppermint scent”, mildly feels like it’d fit in a horror movie as the signature scent of a villain. Love it. I’ve had a lot of luck with her Halloween scents, Fortune Teller is just such a standout that I have to mention that one directly. Sometimes she has hair sprays which are lovely. Her perfumes (formerly Mooscents but it looks like they may have consolidated the sister websites into just Moonalisa) are fantastic, and Fortune Teller is also a seasonal perfume scent there as well.

I’ve heard her candles, incense and royal jelly are also amazing but I have not used them so I don’t have an opinion on that. :)

I used to use a lot of indie lotions, scrubs, etc. but alas my skin condition has gotten worse over time so they no longer work as well for me as they used to and I use boring unscented store bought stuff now. Haus of Gloi and Luvmilk had good scents though. Luvmilk had one called Dream Eater4 and Queen of Hearts5 that were awesome (though the last time I got them they smelled a little different in a way I didn’t like as much) and Haus of Gloi had Ghost Puffs6, which somehow smelled like extra buttery gooey Rice Krispy Treats. HoG’s lotions are pumpkin seed butter primarily, and I think Luvmilk’s is goat milk. Luvmilk also uses goat milk in her powdered milk bath bags.

One of my favorite things about the indie nails community is the prevalence of various jojoba oil blends (and other oils) for nail care. Ethereal/Haunted polish has Etheroils which I’ve come to really enjoy and supplement my boring lotion/cocoa butter Vaseline night routine especially. Apocalypse Polish and Polished for Days both also have great blends that I love. Apocalypse has a rollerball format (like for oil perfumes) and PfD’s uses a makeup brush format where you just swipe it across your nails. My favorite Apocalypse one is Bottom of the Cereal Bowl (smells like fruit loops), and I actually use an unscented PfD one solely because the scented one I use started randomly giving my officemate migraines so I threw it out.*

*In case anyone is concerned my officemate is also a huge scent junkie and all of her items are scented, so please don’t think I’m just tormenting my officemate lol. We collaborate on scents and whether it’ll affect either of us. Sometimes they do unexpectedly and we take it home or throw it out, 99.9% of the time it doesn’t bother either of us and we use our scented stuff as needed. We’re the only ones that use our office unless someone briefly stops by so it really only affects us.

Back to the ramble of thoughts.

Side note: my bottle of Fortune Teller has aged a few years at this point (I splurged on a big EDP/spray) and good god it smells even better than it did when I first purchased it. I feel like I realize that every time I spray it but still, it’s one of those things that actually gets better over time. Anyway.

I guess my last item to talk about is probably bath products!

Witch Baby Soap

Hex Breaker bath bomb from Witch Baby Soap.

There are people who used to unbox entire hauls from this company and I understand why, honestly. In the olden times I think Witch Baby Soap was solely an online shop, but I think she has or had a few locations at this point.

Anyway this shop has a great assortment of scrubs, body oils, lotions, handmade soap and bath bombs and is actually the only one I buy bath bombs from anymore. This isn’t saying anything about anyone else’s bath bombs, but WBS’ actually just really work for my skin for some reason. But this shop is also special to me because I found it because of my writing. One of my characters has a very particular signature scent, and I’d spent a lot of time looking for something to inspire some inspiration for my writing for that character. WBS has a scent simply called Love7 and it immediately inspired so much of my writing for that character.

Love bath bomb from Witch Baby Soap.

Also it’s pink, heart shaped and has rose petals pressed into it. I can’t even tell you how perfect that is. This scent is apples and roses, and not only is it inspiring but I also just happen to love the scent and bathe with these bath bombs often too. This scent also comes in a thick lotion (which I used to use all the time!) but nowadays I use it for a bit of a supplement to my usual lotion routine mostly for the scent. There’s also a scrub and body oil. I’ve used them all, all were great. Heed the expiration date (usually a year out) because the scrub in particular does eventually decay a bit if you don’t use it in a timely manner.

The bath bombs I use the most from her are Love, Hex Breaker8, Fairy Milk9 (now in only bath potion, which is her bath bomb powdered in a bag), her charity bath bombs (various scents depending on the cause), and Dead Man’s Party10.

Yes of course I tried that one because Oingo Boingo but also because of Mollymauk Tealeaf. I’m very predictable in some ways, well worth it to also smell like kettle corn and Halloween party.

Anyway, I have left little footnotes of a bunch of the scent descriptions of these in the footnotes below.

Thanks for reading, and until next time,