Monday, September 29, 2008

A Brooklyn Find - Anwaar

For the past month or so, I have been on a mission (an obsession, really) to start making my own beauty products, specifically lip balm and deodorant. While I am pretty happy with the results of my lip balm, I ran into a little glitch with the deodorant this past week. Apparently I have a sensitivity to orange essential oil, so while it was a very effective disinfecting agent, zapping away bacteria and nasty smells, it was a little too acidic for daily use, and my body could only tolerate it for about a month. I then decided to make a small batch without any kind of fragrance as an emergency measure. My skin problems were solved like magic, but by the end of the day I smelled like the dirty hippie that I am. Ew~! I had to go back to the drawing board, and was researching for fragrances that are gentle enough to put directly onto skin. I love citrus smells, but they all warned about possible skin irritation. Flowery fragrances seemed good, but were so expensive! I was about to give up when I came across a line of shops in downtown Brooklyn, between Atlantic Avenue and my emergency knitting supply store. All of them seemed to have similar items - sticks of incense, rows and rows of essential oils, buckets of various butters - I was in heaven, the answer to my dilemma had appeared! The store I went into was called Anwaar, and it was a little intimidating at first - while it wasn't overly crowded, the customers and staff all seemed to know each other very well, and I felt a little intrusive... Nonetheless, the man there was very helpful and kind to me, and I got a 0.5 ounce bottle of Jasmine oil for $3, and a big tub of shea butter for $3 as well - a find! Not only was the butter cheaper by weight, is was a lot better than the one I got online - this butter was unrefined, meaning that it was chunkier and more yellow, but it had a really good smell to it that the refined butter didn't have. So now, the making of deodorant 2.0 begins...

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