lundi 4 juin 2007
I'm making my own little beauty products...
Sunday morning, I went to "duross & langel".
"duross & langel" is a charming little "beauty shop", nestled in the heart of Center City (03-28-08 update: the shop is now a lot larger but as charming as it was).
Former "duross & langel" store
Steve Duross is a former hairdresser/esthetician with a passion for skin care and beauty products. His passion is such that he embarked (along with his partner James Langel) on a bold and beautiful adventure: making his own soaps, lip balms, body creams, shampoos...
This great adventure, although pretty recent, is already a success.
Which doesn't come as a surprise: the store is pretty (you feel like buying EVERYTHING, of course), the soaps are gorgeous (I can see them on one of my bookshelves, in my living room...) and they smell wonderful (I secretly wanted to eat some).
The ingredients used by Steve are simple, as environmentally-friendly as possible and, whenever possible, "local" or "fair trade". Prices are pretty reasonable and, on top of it all, it will be Steve's pleasure to advise you and answer all your "beauty" questions.
Perfect!
Yet what is unique and mostly interesting at "duross & langel" is that the customer can roll up his sleeves and actually PARTICIPATE in Steve and James's success story...
I had thus registered for the "balms workshop" of this past Sunday morning.
We were six women and had to work by teams of two.
With aprons on, we started making lip balm sticks.
Here, we're setting up the sticks so we can fill them up...
... while Steve is telling us what ingredients we will be using to make the different products: cocoa butter (left), shea butter (right), bees wax (center), olive oil...
Once these ingredients are liquified (by putting them in a pan, over heat), we add essential oils or fruits or flowers extracts. In this particular case, we added lemon extract and we then filled up the sticks:
In the workshop, people get to create products that will be sold in the store.
Very proudly - and once the "concoction" had solidified - we even put the stickers on the tins!
But people also have the opportunity to make products that they can bring home. To make those, Steve offers different extracts/essences to choose from and every "team" has to make its own little creation - with a tiny help from the "maestro". Steve encourages us to smell everything with our eyes closed, to touch, try...
In addition to the lip balm tins,
we also made "bug repellent" sticks
as well as "healing salves" (also in tins).
Steve had told me over the phone that one workshop was $35 (and lasted about two hours) and that we usually went back home with products well worth the $35: I did leave, very happily, with about 12 products! At the end, we all had a little blue bag carrrying not only our creations but also those of the other "teams".
Sharing, creation, beauty: what more could you ask for???
To see a list of upcoming workshops, it's over here (when calling to register, have your credit/debit card ready for payment).
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