Selkie Herbal Detangler: Filling a sea of bottles

Etsy has given NightBlooming the amazing opportunity to participate in Fund, a new and exciting crowd-funding way to give your customers new products, while making it possible for us to take the store to a higher level than ever before.

While there is a lot of information here, please head over to the actual Etsy Fund Campaign, Selkie Herbal Detangler:  Filling a sea of bottles.  We only have thirty days to make this happen, and early backers to get the campaign going are much appreciated!


Important Note for International Customers:  I am so, so sorry that this isn't open to my beloved international customers :(  It isn't an option I had.  Etsy Fund currently doesn't support international shipping or purchasing, though it will eventually.  If you would like to participate in Fund, all I can recommend is that you ask a friend in the US to donate on your behalf and ship the product to you.  I cannot accept payments for Selkie towards the campaign directly, as then it doesn't count as contributing towards the campaign goal. 

How can I help?
Please help by spreading the word.  Getting enough backers is critical to our Fund campaign.  Blog, Tweet, post to forums, and email your long-haired friends.  The more backers Selkie has, the more of a chance this unique opportunity has of succeeding. 

Shipping Included!
Please note that all the options for Selkie on the Fund campaign include shipping within the US :)

Selkie by the amazingly talented Selina Fenech.  Image used with her permission.

What is a Selkie?
Selkies are mythological creatures in Scottish, Irish, and Faroese folklore.  The live in the ocean as seals, but when they come ashore, can shed their seal skins and walk about in human form. Stories concerning selkies are generally romantic tragedies. Sometimes the human will not know that their lover is a selkie, and wakes to find them gone. In other stories the human will hide the selkie's skin, thus preventing the selkie from returning to its seal form.  Selkies, male and female, are sometimes seen in human form upon shoreline rocks, combing their wave-tossed hair. 

Introducing Selkie Detangler

Selkie Ingredients

Every ingredient in Selkie is vegan, hand-blended, and certified organic.  So what’s in it?

• Distilled water– Ensures that Selkie has no mineral buildup and allows for a pH neutral start.

• Marshmallow root, slippery elm & fenugreek seed herbal infusion– These three ingredients give Selkie its slip by virtue of their mucilaginous compounds.  They also naturally soften hair, provide natural plant protein, add shine, and sooth an itchy or dry scalp. 

• Aloe vera gel–  While well-known for its benefits to skin, this third mucilaginous ingredient provides deep moisturizing effects to the hair and scalp as well.  In addition it helps restore pH levels and has both emollient and moisturizing properties, meaning that it smooths the cuticle and attracts and seals in moisture.

• Apple cider vinegar– The mildly acidic nature of this helps balance pH of hair and also helps to remove buildup.   ACV encourages the cuticle of the hair to lay closed, making hair shine and tangle less. 

• Argan Oil–  Sometimes called “Miracle Oil,” argan oil is extracted from kernels of Argan fruit by crushing.  It is swiftly taking the place of other natural oils for hair protection and treatment. Argan oil contains tocopherols (vitamin E), phenols, carotenes, squalene, and fatty acids, making it both light and great for brittle hair.

• Borage Oil– Sometimes known as starflower, borage grows wildly in many parts of the world.  Borage oil is extracted from the seeds of the plant, and its essential ingredient has been found to be gamma linolenic acid, commonly known as GLA, which is an essential fatty acid that provides a replenishing effect on the skin and hair, and is able to restore moisture and elasticity where it had previously been lost.  

• Camelina Oil–  Known as the “gold of pleasure” to Europeans not long ago. Rich in natural antioxidants, Omega-3 fatty acids, tocopherols, and high in vitamin E content, Camelina oil is truly under appreciated. 

• Vitamin E Oil– Our natural Vitamin E oil is obtained by vacuum distillation of vegetable fats derived from non-GMO soy sources. It prevents rancidity and it acts as an anti-oxidant. This particular Vitamin E oil has been verified and tested GMO-free from crop to finished material. 

• Catnip Essential Oil– A stimulant, catnip can increase blood flow to the scalp, encouraging growth. It’s astringent properties help tighten muscles and skin, helping to reduce shedding in some cases. Catnip is also reputed to assist in reducing split ends. 

•  Cedarwood Essential Oil– Excellent for both hair and skin care. It balances oily skin, soothes and helps to heal skin rashes, and reduces oil in hair and skin. 

•  Lavender Essential Oil– Enhances hair growth by stimulating the scalp. The name “lavender” is derived from the Latin lavare, meaning, “to wash” and was known as one of the seven polyvalents (effective against many toxins). 

• Lime  Essential Oil–  A bright scent, lime is antiviral, astringent, and bactericidal. It is at once a cleansing and moisturizing oil, helping with dandruff and scalp buildup.   

•   Petitgrain Essential Oil– Made from the leaves and twigs of this amazing tree, it is antiseptic, antispasmodic, a natural deodorant, and nervine. Use in a hair oil will leave hair and scalp fragrant (petitgrain has woody, citrus and floral notes all in one!), while soothing and preventing bacterial and fungal growth.

• Sage Essential Oil– A scalp soother and astringent, the herb is of ancient repute, valued as a culinary and medicinal plant – called herba sacra, ‘sacred herb’, by the Romans.  

What this means is I have to fill lots, and lots, and LOTS of bottles.  This is where your help comes in!

Part of the idea for naming Selkie after a sea-fairy was because, sometimes while filling bottles, my countertop winds up looking like the sea. Every single product NightBlooming offers is filled by hand, and in my determination never to skimp on product I sometimes overdo it.  Using a top-heavy funnel is time-consuming and messy at best.

This machine would allow me to fill not only bottles of Selkie, but many of our other products as well: Triple Moon Oil, Panacea’s Hair Salve, Ostara’s Hair Salve, and Freya’s Hair Salve. Its design is compact, efficient, and easy to use. All parts of the machine that come into contact with either the product or the bottle being filled are made of stainless steel and Polytetrafluoroethylene and meet food-grade standards. On average the machine can fill 40 bottles per minute, which would be a mind-blowing increase in efficiency and accuracy!  (The fact that I wouldn’t have to swab the countertops like a sailor on a ship would be a nice bonus, too.)

What if this really winds up rocking and we exceed our goal?

Selkie Herbal Hair Detangler comes in high-quality, reusable, and recyclable amber glass bottles. If we exceed our goal, the extra funds will go towards exploring adding spouted refill pouches as a way for us to not only get a lot of uses out of one bottle, but also reduce shipping costs for our customers who want more! 

The blind kitten in your video, who is he?  How is he doing?

Tsavo is the official NightBlooming mascot (he’s even listed on the store staff page along with our honey bees).  You can read all about him, and his amazing journey from blind to being able to see on our blog. The short version, though, is that thanks to the kindhearted people of Etsy, he is now almost 7 years old and doing great!

Again, thank you so much, and see you over on our Selkie Campain page!  Leave your comments below and help spread the word!

A New Product Approaches Shore

selkie blues by sgorbissa on DeviantArt

You might be able to catch your first glimpse of Selkie on June 16th, but what is she?  Will you be able to catch her?  And if you do, can you make her stay?

Calculated Shipping & New Shipping Labels

Calculated Shipping

I've talked a little in the past how shipping on Etsy was a messed up game of averages.  Check out the "How do you set shipping costs?" section in the link for more detail, but the short version is I had to create these shipping profiles and assign them to products.  It entailed a lot of fine-tuning them again and again and again.  If the guessing game was wrong and I was short on what Etsy collected for postage I was kinda screwed because I wasn't going to go back to a customer and ask for extra to cover the difference.  If it was too much over, I was doing refunds.  There was also no way to do shipping upgrades at checkout. 

Calculated shipping is a new feature in Etsy that live-calculates the amount of postage needed to send a parcel from me to you.  Each item in the shop is now assigned a weight and dimensions (meaning I had to weigh and measure every individual item, which is why this all took a little while to get off the ground).  When you add items to your cart, Etsy adds up the total weight for the package and then checks my address, then yours, and then figures out what it would cost to ship a package of that weight from here to there.  It also adds in a very small ( 50 cents) shipping and handling fee per item to cover the cost of packaging materials, labels, tape, time spent packing, etc.

As a bonus, you now get to select from multiple shipping options if you'd like things there faster, or pick the lowest rate if the box doesn't need to break the sound barrier along the way.

If you want to check the shipping on a single item, it's on the Shipping & Policies tab.  To see multiple items and combined shipping you'll have to check in the cart.

New Shipping Labels

My international customers have never seen what the domestic labels look like, but it was like this:

I used a postage printing program called Endicia that allows me to create my own (domestic) labels and print all labels (domestic and international) from home.  This was a huge boon over having to address and weigh all the boxes and take them to the post office, but the process was still pretty inefficient.

It went something like this:

• Take all the items for an order and put them in their box/bubble mailer
• Weigh the package
• Put the package weight and the customer's name on the package
• Put the package in my shipping bin
• Repeat for every order (usually 8-20 on the nights I pack, which is very late at night on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays)
• Once all the orders are packed, go to the office, open Photoshop and my postage printing program
• Enter the address and weight for a package and create the label.
• Pull the labels into Photoshop and arrange it on an 8 1/2 - 11 page (usually I can get 5-6 labels per full sized sheet)
• Enter the tracking information on Etsy
• Mark the order as shipped on Etsy and send the confirmation email
• Repeat for every order
• Print out the sheets of labels
• Cut out the labels by hand
• Play hide and seek, matching the right label to the right package
• Peel and stick the labels
• Put all the packages back in the shipping bin and set them out for the post

On a night with 8-10 orders, assuming every product was already packaged with a label (which is another ongoing battle), boxing would take me two or three hours with labels taking another hour+.  For such an inefficient process, I was pretty fast with it in the end, but yeah, still inefficient.  

Enter two things:  Etsy shipping labels, and a new label printer.

Etsy Shipping Labels

Etsy recently paired with Endicia (which is the same company I was already using) to allow sellers to print labels right off Etsy and be charged through there rather than buying postage for my account and having it deducted that way.  Here's what it looks like on my end:

The arrow is pointing to the option that says "Format for 4x6 label printers"

Here I enter the final package weight (if it was a little different than the calculated weight), enter a message to the buyer, pick a few other variables and the decide what I want the output to be.  By doing it this way, the tracking number is automatically assigned and sent to the buyer in one step, eliminating the chance of me screwing it while entering it. 

I go through each order this way and then at the end print them all out to one PDF document that's sized for 4x6 labels.  They look like this:

Lame, I know.  I hate them.  That these labels look so... not special is one of the main reasons I held out doing this for so long.  I like the idea that my customers get excited (at least I hope you do!) when you see the pretty NightBlooming logo on your package.  I'm currently looking into a sticker I could add to the label to make it a little more special again.

If I actually had magical packing faeries, I'd be the happiest person ever.

But, regardless, I'd love your thoughts.  Do you like the logo on your packages?  Does it make them feel special or am I being a little silly?

New Label Printer

In any event, design aside, the new labels can be printed on this little guy:

Come on, for a printer he IS pretty cute!

The label paper is thermal-printed, so it doesn't consume ink.  The labels are also glossy, peel and stick, and much more weather-resistant than the ones I was previously using. 

So what's the process now?

A lot more streamlined.  I just ran my first night with the new labels and printer and already tell it's going to be a massive time improvement once I get a into a groove with the new system.  The process is now like this:

• Take all the items for an order and put them in their box/bubble mailer
• Write the customer's name on the package
• Check the final weight and enter it into the Etsy label field
• Repeat for all items
• Purchase and print all the labels
• Play hide and seek, matching the right label to the right package
• Peel and stick the labels
• Put all the packages back in the shipping bin and set them out for the post

MUCH better.  I'm hoping over time I'll be able to make better improvements, like printing each label as I go (right now that feels like a time sink because I have to go through the label purchase process per each label rather than all at once and print them at once, but there might be a better way).

I know this all wasn't the most exciting stuff ever, but I knew people would notice when they started getting labels that looked differently and wanted to give the why.  As always, I appreciate your feedback.  That you have the best experience possible and reliably get your packages for a reasonable rate is super-important to me.  I just bought a $4.50 eyeliner pencil today and they charged me $5 to ship it.  I promise, I am never going to be that person :)

June blend: Evening Star Nighttime Hair Oil

You can see all of the past featured oil blends of the month here!

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Evening Star Nighttime Hair Oil Blend: A light oil perfect for absorbing overnight, scented with essential oils that will help you relax and fall asleep.

Pick it up in either our 1/2 ounce or 4 ounce size!

Base Oil: Safflower
Secondary Oils: Argan, Camelina 
Essential Oils: Lavender, Valerian, Mugwort, Sweet Marjoram, German (Blue) Chamomile, Frankincense, Clary Sage, Copaiba

Aroma: Dusky woods, nighttime herbs, and evening flowers. 

Application: Intended for use on either the scalp or length.

Detailed Ingredients:

Safflower Oil- also known as Carthamus tinctorius, functions as an emollient when applied topically, helping to keep skin and hair hydrated and moisturized. Safflower oil is a source naturally high in the vitamin E antioxidant, which helps reduce surface roughness.

Argan oil, dubbed as Miracle oil; extracted from kernels of Argan fruit by crushing, is swiftly taking the place of other natural oils for hair protection and treatment. Argan oil contains tocopherols (vitamin E), phenols, carotenes, squalene, and fatty acids, making it both light and great for brittle hair. 

Camelina Oil was known as the "gold of pleasure" to Europeans not long ago. Rich in natural antioxidants, Omega-3 fatty acids, tocopherols, and high in vitamin E content; Camelina oil is truly under appreciated. Camelina oil also has incredibly high in both alpha-linolenic and linoleic acid contents, and proportions this large are more typically found in linseed oil and fish oil. 

Lavender Essential Oil– Enhances hair growth by stimulating the scalp. The name “lavender” is derived from the Latin lavare, meaning, “to wash” and was known as one of the seven polyvalents (effective against many toxins). Greeks and Romans perfumed their bathwater with lavender, burned lavender incense to appease their wrathful gods, and believed the scent of lavender to be soothing to untamed lions and tigers.

Valerian Essential Oil– Widely known for its sedative properties. Valerian has a long history of treating insomnia, and other nervous tensions. Aroma: warm-woody, balsamic, musky.

Mugwort Essential Oil– The plant most associated with sleep and lucid dreaming is mugwort, artemisia vulgaris. Essential oil containing 1,8-cineole, camphor, linalool, or thujone, along with over 100 other identified components. The flowers also contain beta-sitosterol, coumarins, and alpha- and beta-carotene. Smells of evening flowers. 

Sweet Marjoram Essential Oil– The Greeks referred to this plant as the joy of the mountains and considered it a symbol of happiness. It is considered an herb for relaxation, sleep, and to relieve stress. It's aroma is bright, sweet and balsamic. 

German (Blue) Chamomile Essential Oil– Promotes hair growth, scalp soother and hair conditioner. This most soothing of herbs was used in ancient Egyptian medicine as an emblem of the omnipotence of Ra through its power to restore wholeness to the Self.

Frankincense Essential Oil- Frankincense Oil is extracted from gum or resin of Frankincense or Olibanum tree. Apart from being used as a cosmetic and as a fragrance, it has numerous other benefits including being an antiseptic and disinfectant. It is also a cicatrisant, helping reduce scars and easing tight skin. 

Copaiba Essential Oil– Restores skin cells and rejuvenates hair cells, this essential oil is often used to aid relaxation. Aroma: Mild, sweet, woody, slightly balsamic.

New Essential Oils and May Recipe of the Month

More New Essential Oils

We're happy to introduce two new essential oils!  You can use these in either our 1/2 ounce or 4 ounce custom oil blends. 


Amyris (Amyris balsamifera)- Distilled from the Amyris tree, this wood essential is warm and soothing.  Promotes cell regeneration in skin and fights dryness.  Possesses both antiseptic and sedative qualities.. 

Lime (Citrus latifolia)- A bright scent, lime is antiviral, astringent, and bactericidal. It is at once a cleansing and moisturizing oil, helping with dandruff and scalp buildup. .

Sun Soother Blend:

Sun Soother Blend: This is a light, moisturizing blend, perfect for hair that's had a long day in the summer sun and wind, or as a protectant that can be applied before going outside to prevent moisture loss. 

Base Oil: Sunflower, Evening Primrose Oil
Secondary Oils: Meadowfoam, Rosehip 
Essential Oils: German (Blue) Chamomile, Amyris, Ylang-ylang, Clary-Sage, Lavender, Lime, Sandalwood

Aroma: A field of summer herbs and flowers with a bright ray of citrus.  

Application: Intended for the length of hair, but can also be used to soothe a dry scalp. For the length, apply a few drops to your palms, rub together and lightly smooth over hair. For the scalp, use the dropper to apply tiny drops or fine lines of oil to the scalp and gently massage in with your fingers.

Detailed Ingredients:

Sunflower Oil Organic Cold–Pressed Unrefined– An oil wealthy in Oleic acids with high amounts of Vitamins A, D, and E, also has beneficial amounts of lecithin, and unsaturated fatty acids. Deeply nourishing and conditioning for the skin and hair it is a natural emollient (meaning it corrects scaling and dryness), by helping upraised skin and hair cells lay flat, helping to increase shine and keep in moisture. Cold-pressed oil, also called cold-drawn, or virgin, oil, is purer than oil expressed with the aid of heat and retains more of its natural benefits.

Evening Primrose Oil– This oil comes from the pressed the seeds of the Evening Primrose plant, Oenothera biennis . The yellow flowers only open in the evening, hence their common name. Evening Primrose Seed Oil is a rich source of gamma linoleic acid, an Omega 6 fatty acid and nourishes the scalp, hair, and even your nails. 

Meadowfoam Oil- Meadowfoam Oil is pressed from the seeds of Meadowfoam (Limnanthes alba), a plant which received its name because of its resemblance while in bloom to the white foam blowing on the ocean. Meadowfoam oil contains higher quality triglyceride levels when compared to other vegetable oils It also has amazing moisturizing and rejuvenating capabilities and is very stable, meaning it keeps a long time. When applied to the skin, it forms a moisture barrier and will assist the skin with preventing moisture loss. It is a key ingredient in many different products such as massage oils and lotions, facial creams, sunblock, hair and scalp products, cosmetics, body lotions, and shaving creams. In hair care products, it will add shine and moisture to the hair, and will remedy dry or damaged hair.

Rose hip Oil- is extracted from the seeds contained in the intensely red berry-like fruits -or hips- of a wild rose-bush that grows in the cool, lush mountain rainy valleys of the southern Andes, in Chile. It is a superb hydrator with a high absorbing level, penetrating dry skin and hair almost instantly to restore a much needed moisture balance frequently lost by climatic and environmental conditions such as dryness and air toxicity.

German Chamomile Essential Oil– Promotes hair growth, scalp soother and hair conditioner. This most soothing of herbs was used in ancient Egyptian medicine as an emblem of the omnipotence of Ra through its power to restore wholeness to the Self.

Amyris Essential Oil– Distilled from the Amyris tree, this wood essential is warm and soothing. Promotes cell regeneration in skin and fights dryness. Possesses both antiseptic and sedative qualities.

Ylang–Ylang Essential Oil– The extract of lilies, this oil is a scalp soother and follicle stimulator. Indonesians spread the luxuriant flowers on the marriage bed of the newly weeded couples. Ylang means “flowers of flowers,” sometimes called “the perfume tree.”

Sage Essential Oil– A scalp soother and astringent, the herb is of ancient repute, valued as a culinary and medicinal plant – called herba sacra, ‘sacred herb’, by the Romans

Lime Peel Essential Oil– A bright scent, lime is antiviral, astringent, and bactericidal. It is at once a cleansing and moisturizing oil, helping with dandruff and scalp buildup. 

Sandalwood Essential Oil- An anti-inflammatory with a warm woody scent, it soothes tender scalps and can help help heal eczema and psoriasis, soothe, shrink pimples and reduce dandruff.