Monday, May 23, 2011

Things I Like: Olive and Oud, or "Rhymes with 'Food' "

My friend Laura Natusch recently rechristened her soap and skin-care products company "Olive and Oud" - and yes, it does rhyme with "food", as she explained to me the other day.


The name and packaging have changed, the products are as delightful as ever. I now have her soaps in my shower, two varieties of her lip balm tucked in various purses and dresser drawers (replacing the tube of lipbalm I had bought from Whole Foods, which I tossed into the Honda as the "emergency" lipbalm of last resort.) And I've been using her deodorant for going on two years now (the lavender/tea tree oil one is my favorite).

I'm not a "soap person"; bath products are not my fall-back choice for gift giving, and I've tended to purchase whatever was reasonably cheap but not too drying in the way of a bar for the shower. I've looked at those big blocks of multicolored soaps like psychedelic cheeses at the co-ops and markets ("Cut your own soap!") and resisted their siren call (or scream); I've admired the bars in pale tones and natural scents on the shelves, wrapped in plain brown paper to convey a sense of the "natural", admired the look, whiffed appreciatively, and moved on.

Laura is the first soapmaker who actually stopped me in my tracks. With a bar of soap, of all things. Later on, with the aforementioned deodorant, then the lip balm, and somewhere along the way I actually purchased a facial "serum" in a precious cobalt bottle, made olive oil, rose oil, nut oils, and other botanical extracts I can actually identify. This is not the imitation "natural" product that is beginning to proliferate on store shelves, btw: a slurry of unpronounceable chemical additives and space-age polymers with a few drops of rosemary, aloe, chamomile, etc thrown in for "green chic" and legitimacy.

She started out, as I suppose many do, with premixed scents, but has since developed her own "signatures", constantly experimenting to become a true artist with scents. Experiencing her products is like spending time appreciating fine wines, rare teas, or enjoying a well-cooked meal. Many of her soaps incorporate some of my favorite foods, spices, herbs: coriander, cardamon, grapefruit, vanilla, ginger. She combines the "edibles" with "nonedibles" like jasmine flower, often in surprising and subtle ways. I abhor patchouli, for instance - except when Laura uses it; I'm never aware of it's presence until she informs me of it in the "Orange Patchouli", balanced with real orange juice, black pepper, and sandalwood until it smells nothing "patchouli" that I've ever known. (Thank goodness.) I'm only aware of nearly-indescribable layers of scent; not so much individual elements I can pick out, but total scent environments or "moods": warm and relaxing, or warm and sensual; cool and breezy, or cool and smoky. They bring back memories, real or imagined, of a day at the beach, a walk in the woods, a lazy afternoon's lovemaking.

And yes, this IS soap I am talking about. But it never is just quite soap, and the purpose of the product almost seems beside the point...except it just so happens that these lush, lovely things are also entirely practical. There's a reason I've been buying Laura's deodorant for two years, along with the soaps and everything she makes: because it works. (Ask my significant other.) And it does so without aluminum or chemical additives.

Particular favorite of mine include the "Ginger Orange Vetiver", "Grapefruit Mimosa with Coriander and two Jasmines" (yes, it really is as good as it sounds. Possibly better.) "Scheherazade" with tuberose, ylang ylang, tumeric, blood orange, black pepper, nutmeg...These fragrances would bring me to my knees, but that would be terribly unseemly even in the laid-back atmosphere of Fiddleheads Co-op.

There's also the "Butter Mint with Organic Cocoa Butter" that always makes me terribly hungry; I suppose a hot toddy is the closest equivalent - warm and rich, minty and chocolately (but not "too"), and very creamy all at once. Her scents never operate on just one level, and therein perhaps is the key to my personal devotion. There are soaps that smell like "pine", "rose", "lavender", and so forth, and are lovely things in their own right. But they continue to smell like "pine" and "rose" and "lavender", that thing and nothing else, from the moment you find the bar in the store to long after the last traces have been rinsed away from your skin. For me the magic in Laura's fragrances is not just in the layers, in the blending of disparate essences until they become something else altogether; it's the fact that they evolve, as fine perfumes do, releasing top, middle and base notes over time.

Next Saturday is, I believe, her last week at the Fiddleheads Co-op Saturday Market for a while (13 Broad Street, New London); if you haven't had a chance to catch her yet and take a (deep, luxurious) whiff of her products, please do.