Scent as Design

If you're in New York City on Friday, March 26th, you might want to check out a daylong symposium on Scent as Design to be held at The New School's Tishman Auditorium, 66 West 12th Street (between 5th & 6th Avenues), Manhattan.

You can learn more about the event here.

Special thanks to Kayla Fioravanti of Essential Wholesale for tweeting about this event.

Great Computer Diagnostic Tool

I won't bore you with all the computer problems we had even after getting a new hard drive. Fortunately a guy at our computer user group told us about Hiren's Boot CD. If your computer crashes, the Hiren's disk allows you to boot up your computer. It also contains a slew of diagnostic tools like hard drive recovery, hard drive backup, RAM testing, antivirus, anti-spyware, partition tools, and a whole lot more.

Smelly Jellies Now 20% Larger!

You Scent Me's smelly jellies (reusable air fresheners) are now 20% larger! They're great to use in places where candles aren't allowed like dorm rooms and hospital rooms. Smelly jellies are available in all your favorite You Scent Me fragrances.

Wasabi Becomes #1 Selling Fragrance!

You Scent Me has a new #1 selling fragrance -- Wasabi! Wasabi is composed of refreshing top notes of eucalyptus, ginger and peppermint, grounded with thyme and the faintest touch of amber and musk. You can order bath and body products in Wasabi, as well as 51 other scrumptious scents at You Scent Me .

How's Everybody Doing?

Hope everyone had a great holiday season and that the new year brings you and your loved ones health and prosperity. Blogging time was put on hold in order to fill orders and work on some soapy holiday projects.

Of course it also didn't help that our computer was also infected by a nasty trojan.dropper virus. This nasty bugger found its way past our firewall, anti-virus software, and anti-malware software. We went on computer forums and followed all the steps to clean an infected computer. While all our diagnostic software scans came up clean, we kept getting popups about this nasty worm. It got so bad that Windows wasn't able to boot up. Our computer came pre-installed with Windows XP, so we did not have a Windows disk. Still, we were luckier than most. Steve happened to be at a meeting of our computer user group when they handed out CDs with Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a free operating system. It allowed us to boot up our computer and allowed us to get any files that hadn't already been backed up, off the system. (You can also do the same thing if you make yourself a rescue disk.) Good thing too, as we had taken our computer to one of our computer guru friends. After valiantly working on our computer for five hours, our hard drive was pronounced dead. We have a new hard drive, but our computer is still acting strange, like today, it lost its internet connection three times. Right now we're so fed up that both of us want to throw the computer out the window (pun intended). If my husband's livelihood didn't depend on a PC environment, I'd switch to a Mac in a heartbeat.

Giving thanks to all of our customers, Facebook fans, Twitter followers, blog subscribers and readers, family and friends. You're the best! Thank you for your support, friendship, comments and suggestions.

This is a very exciting time at You Scent Me. Our blog is steadily gaining new followers. At one point the view rate was up by as much as 200%! In other exciting news, we received our first recommendation at LinkedIn.

We now have over 600 followers on Twitter! We've received a few Follow Friday recommendations. According to WeFollow, we are ranked #15 as the most influential soapmaker on Twitter!

As you can see, there's so much to be thankful for this Thanksgiving. Wishing you all a very happy and healthy Thanksgiving.

Glad I Didn't Throw Out My Old Thermometer

Yesterday I made a batch of CPHP (crock pot hot process) soap. The flashpoint of the fragrance I was going to scent the batch with was 200ºF. I pointed my laser thermometer at the soap as soon as it had finished cooking. It gave a reading of 160º. That didn't look right. I wondered how soap that hadn't had a chance to cool, already be below the fragrance flashpoint? I took out my old thermometer which has a probe, stuck it into the soap, and sure enough, it gave me a reading of over 200º!

Another soaping lesson learned. What has been your biggest lesson learned?