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ellocentipede · 4 years

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Mystic Music Soaps Spring and Summer 2020 Soaps and Bath Bombs

Annette of Mystic Music Soaps has been busy experimenting with scents and designs for both soaps and bath bombs, and has created a beautiful array of options for spring and summer! As always, her soaps are visually stunning, well-scented, and have a soft and creamy lather. Her bath bombs create a well-scented and pretty bath that provides a tranquil respite after a busy day.

Avalon Bath Ballistic

Scent description: According to Arthurian legend, the Isle of Avalon was an island full of wild apple trees. Those who lived on the island had an idyllic existence and many still search for Avalon although its still unclear whether this magical paradise existed or it is derived from Celtic myth. Top notes of citrus with middle notes of apple, sugar and violet intermingle with bottom notes of peach and musk to create this enchanted fragrance. This soap, just as the descriptions states above smells of "an island full of wild apple trees".

I love this bath bomb so much (and the matching soap as well!). To my nose it’s a happy and refreshing blend of green apples, greenery, a fresh breeze, and soft florals. It’s sunny and uplifting. It’s one of my very favorites and I’ll continue to purchase as long as it’s available. <3

Beautiful Bath Ballistic

Scent description: Night blooming jasmine with a secondary addition of rose and a hint of vanilla. It is feminine, flirty, and fun! If you love Lush® brand Flying Fox™, you will adore this luxurious and garden green floral!

Lush’s Flying Fox scent to my nose is a thick, brown honey-coated jasmine petal, but Beautiful smells more soft and natural. I hate to say it, but I prefer Beautiful more--there’s less honey and it smells more like a realistic, sun-warmed jasmine blossom. Really lovely.

Bohemian Queen Bath Ballistic

Scent description: This is a playful combination of citrus notes such as bergamot, orange & grapefruit added to a beautiful vanilla heart and then given a kiss of bourbon rose. Nothing traditional in this one as it is so playful and unconventional....a true Bohemian Queen!

This was a pretty rose blend, but the bergamot and grapefruit skewed it a bit sharp and bitter for me. It smelled like a dark rose, maybe with hints of something sinuous like oudh.

Forest Nymph Bath Ballistic and Bubble Bar

Scent description: An exotic blend of oakmoss and patchouli creating a fragrance that is green and woodsy. If you love Lush® brand Tramp™, you will adore this one!!

Tramp is one of my very favorite scents ever, and Annette’s Forest Nymph hits the Tramp-y mark perfectly! I could bathe in this forever. This makes for a beautiful, natural bath--like bathing in a pool in a mossy, shadowy forest glade. I get lots of oakmoss and greenness, and a hint of tame patchouli that reads like dark earth-crusted logs. Love!

Seven Seas Bath Ballistic and Bubble Bar

Scent description: A clean, fresh, and spa-like scent. This bath ballistic has notes of creamy rice flower, citrus peel, cotton blossoms, night-blooming jasmine, azure sky ozone, grey sea salt, bamboo leaves, vanilla bean, and sheer musk.

True to description, this is a very clean scent. I get lots of ozone, salt, and whiffs of cotton blossom and citrus. This does smell like a product that would be used at an upscale spa.

Stems and Roses Bath Ballistic

Scent description: Have you ever wondered if you could capture the scent of fresh flowers as you are cutting the stems and arranging them in a vase? I just LOVE the smell of fresh cut roses and the green stems as I'm arranging them and I really wanted to capture that in this ballistic. Follow my scent journey here and embrace the simplistic beauty of stems & roses in your bath!

Bohemian Queen let me down a bit, but Stems and Roses brought me all the way back up! This was a fun and experimental blend that showcased a beautiful rose with snaps of fresh greenery. It did feel like sticking my nose in a bouquet.

Abalone Bath Ballistic

Scent description: A fresh burst of ocean (ozone) scent with notes of day lily, sea spray, watery florals and musk.

This is a gorgeous briny floral scent, like a sea breeze blowing through a tropical garden. I really enjoyed this bath--it was pretty and summery, with a touch of elegance and sophistication.

Miami Beach Bath Ballistic

Scent description: Be whisked away to the beach, sipping daiquiris and enjoying all life has to offer! This ballistic will send you to Miami Beach where worries melt away and life is good! Fresh notes of ripe melon along with orange slices, lemon and lime peel combine with a fresh cut grass nuance. A heart of jasmine, violet and lavender slip into a background of sweet exotic, woody notes.

Miami Beach is yet another classy and fun beach scent--a little breezy, a little salty, with a little hint of frozen margarita and a wee nip of fancy perfume. I love it!

South Pacific Bath Ballistic

Scent description: Sea salt, sea moss and green vetiver round out this fresh and aquatic ballistic!

South Pacific is another winning sea scent! I love all of them, but this one may be my favorite of the bunch. It’s a fresh ocean scent, but it’s not so fresh that it smells sharp. It’s smooth and natural and also smells a bit elegant, like there’s a hint of white tropical florals wafting on this sea breeze. It’s both tranquil and vibrant in feel--just like the colors that Annette selected for it. Lovely.

County Fair Soap

Scent description: One of my earliest memories of a conglomeration of good smells was walking into the Texas State Fair and then subsequently smaller County Fairs, statewide through my childhood. Not only did it signify fun by all the sights and sounds but always the smell of the most extravagant cakes and candies everywhere you were in "the Fair"! This is my interpretation of all the good things, "County Fair". Caramel coated Granny Smith apples, funnel cakes, a bit of cotton candy and buttered popcorn. Not too sweet from the Funnel Cake, the perfect amount of Granny Smith apples for crisp zing and just the right amount of salt from the popcorn. Its the perfect memory!

Well this is delightful! This is such a happy and fun scent. The tart green apple complements the sweet notes perfectly. The hint of popcorn is a lovely, fun addition. This is a nostalgic blend that makes me think of childhood. It’s all so well-blended and well-balanced.

ELVIS Soap

Scent description: This is the scent of blue suede shoes, cuban cigars (the ones ELVIS always had on him in real life and in movies), and with sweetgrass and cedar to pay homage to his roots of the small home he was raised in Tupelo, Mississippi.

This smells like new suede and smooth leather, like new shoes! It’s a nice, clean, gentlemanly scent that is really appropriate in soap form.

Key Lime Pie Soap

Scent description: Growing up, I was extremely lucky to have family that lived in Key West. Such a quaint little island with so many places to go and so many things to do, it still stands out to me as a wonderful place that also had deliciously famous key lime pie (of course!). I wanted to create a soap with the same "velvet zestiness" of that pie I still remember to this day. After many trials of blending oils, I found the perfect blend of lime, lemon and sweet orange essential oils. Its topped with a bit of whipped cream and a lime wedge for good measure.

Aw man, this really does smell like key lime pie filling. Key lime pie is one of my very favorites, so I love this! This smells like the perfect sugared lime. Love love!

Madonna Soap

Scent description: This is my tribute to Madonna's "Material Girl": A soft, sweet woody-floral fragrance with azalea, jasmine, lavender and rose notes. Added to the base notes are patchouli and other precious woods with hints of citrus and other fruits, balsam and vanilla.

Yea, this is probably what Madonna actually smells like! It smells expensive and a bit edgy--like a fine oriental perfume studded with rich leather and edged with a touch of earthy patchouli. This one is a surprise love for me.

Mango Coconut Cooler Soap

Scent description: Creamy coconut, luscious mango and a hint of island spices. This is tropical Summer just around the corner.

A cold, frothy coconut beverage with chunks of frozen mango and a sprig of ming. This is nice and cooling, and will be wonderful in summer.

Mother Earth Soap

Scent description: This is such a gorgeous and well rounded blend of essential oils! It's refreshing, grounded, herbaceous and invigorating.Essential oils of: bergamot, cassia root, cedarwood, nutmeg, lavadin (lavender), and peppermint.

Ok, this is a new favorite for me. I’ve got a soft spot for earthy and herbal scents, and this is a great one. I get lots of fresh peppermint and a touch of fragrant cassia root (a bit cinnamon-y without being overwhelmingly spicy). Really beautiful.

Mystic Mint Soap

Scent description: Fresh mint from my garden having flourished in the Tennessee sunshine and then prepared to steep lightly in invigorating white tea.

This is a very fresh spearmint blend that almost smells like Doublemint gum! This will be lovely and refreshing to use when it’s hot outside.

Ocean Spray Soap

Scent description: With eucalyptus and spearmint in the forefront, this scent has a zingy kick. Add lemongrass to the mix and you have one of the most refreshing and stimulating smells on the planet.

This is a jazzed up version of the Tequila! blend (reviewed below), with extra-bracing ocean air. I think I smell a hint of mint, so this is more of a temperate ocean breeze than a tropical one. An uplifting, clean scent.

Orange Creamsicle Soap

Scent description: Orange creamsicle soap smells like a delicious dream on an extraordinary summer day! I can't get enough of the combination of sweet orange essential oil + vanilla cream accord. To me, it brings back the memories of orange creamsicle treats fresh out of the freezer to enjoy on a warm day.

This smells just like a creamsicle and now I’m craving one! This is a perfectly-balanced orange and vanilla scent that absolutely evokes the scent of true creamsicles!

Shipwrecked Soap

Scent description: This is the subtle breeze of salt spray as you realize the awe in the power of the wild seas at work! Crashing waves of salt aging the wooden hull of a lovely boat right before your eyes.

If Ocean Spray is a temperate ocean breeze, Shipwrecked is the tropical version! This is a beautiful, clean ocean breeze blowing lazily through palm fronds. Lovely.

Tequila! Soap

Scent description: Sea salt, agave cactus and a fresh burst of Persian lime essential oil has this bar singing, "Tequila!". Now, try and get that song out of your head (while singing in the shower)!

Clean refreshing salty ocean air with a fun twist of lime!

Mystic Music Soaps’ beautiful soaps and bath goodies may be perused and purchased at https://www.mysticmusicsoaps.com/

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nofomoartworld · 7 years

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Hyperallergic: A Comic Artist Draws on Emotional Isolation and Domestic Strife

From Roughneck by Jeff Lemire (image courtesy of Gallery 13)

The post-career road for brawny ex-pro hockey player Derek Ouelette is crushing him, but the years that came before were absolutely pulverizing. In award-winning comics artist and writer Jeff Lemire’s ink and watercolor graphic novel Roughneck, a pugnacious former defenseman can’t steer through a weekday without a drink. It’s a crippling habit for the emotionally isolated loner that leads to altercations at his corner bar as well as a stream of memories of the abusive alcoholic father who terrorized him. The weight is only lifted when his sister returns to their hometown to ask for his help. In two new comics from Lemire — Royal City from Image, and Roughneck, the first work from Simon and Schuster’s graphic books imprint Gallery 13 — the artist portrays a pair of families’ difficult pasts as well the obstacles that crowd their paths ahead.

From Roughneck by Jeff Lemire (image courtesy of Gallery 13)

The Ouelettes’ story unfurls beneath a small Canadian province’s smoking chimneys and ash-toned winter skies. Roughneck’s broken, broad-nosed protagonist beats a bar patron senseless in the snowy present-day fictional town of Pimitamon during a violent first act. Physical attacks here viscerally call attention to a past that Ouelette spent in the penalty box or enduring the wrath of his family’s drunken patriarch. When Lemire breaks from the comic’s subdued blue gradients and deep blacks for full-color flashbacks, we see middle-aged Ouelette’s glory days as an “enforcer,” an unofficial hockey label for a player who racks up penalties when responding to an opponent’s violence. The hockey minutia conjures Lemire’s popular Essex County, but I was also reminded of deceased Saskatchewan-born player Derek Boogaard, and not just for his given name. Like Roughneck’s similarly burly character, Boogaard was raised up north, and his time in the NHL ended while playing for the New York Rangers. The New York Times reported that he traversed Western Canada’s “dark and icy landscapes” as a kid for scrimmages before he went pro. Things aren’t nearly as tragic for Ouelette as they were for Boogaard, who died at 28 from an accidental overdose and was discovered to have had a brain disease. But just as an injury halted the pro’s career, the beating that Roughneck’s enforcer delivered on the ice ended his own.

“I was never a hockey player, Al,” says Ouelette to a family friend, mulling the dirty play that got him expelled. “I was just a thug.”

Cover of Roughneck by Jeff Lemire (image courtesy of Gallery 13)

Lemire’s balding “thug” has slitted eyes and lumpy cheekbones. His boxy shoulders swallow up a full-width panel’s real estate when he’s maneuvering in and out of the book’s many small spaces. After line-cook shifts at a diner, Ouelette sleeps in a local hockey rink’s janitorial closet. His job is depicted in maddening panels that bounce the reader from a wall clock’s face to a frying pan — a nod to Lemire’s work in downtown Toronto kitchens that’s reminiscent of Mimi Pond’s Over Easy. Ouelette’s contact with others is limited to Al or Sheriff Ray, who is often tasked with arresting him for assault (or trying to — for all of Lemire’s realist endeavors, his character breaks the law and walks with ludicrous frequency). Outdoors, widescreen naturalist scenery envelopes Ouelette. He’s suddenly slight and vulnerable amid a range of black-silhouetted pines or snow-capped water towers on Roughneck’s splash pages. Al, a father figure who grew up with Derek’s beloved mother, teaches him to hunt in the still Canadian bush. Otherwise Ouelette just lingers, gazing skyward and fishing whiskey from his parka to quiet memories of his ferocious father.

When his sister Beth shows up, Ouelette pulls back on the drinking. It’s been years since they talked — after Derek shipped off to the NHL, Beth was left to fend for herself on a path that led her to homelessness, opioid abuse, and into the arms of a scruffy criminal named Wade whose red-checked flannel pops from Lemire’s primary-color palette. He differs little from their father.

“You left me,” Beth tells Ouelette. “I was thirteen and you left me alone here, Derek!”

Difficult circumstances force the siblings to hide away — out of Wade’s reach — at Al’s remote hunting cabin. There’s trouble ahead for Beth, and its related tension is paired with a reopening of fresh childhood wounds. But when she seeks out her father at his blue-collar job near Pimitamon, it feels extraneous and inauthentic. The confrontation has all the limpness of an afternoon soap opera compared to the artist’s portrayal of the decades-old trauma that Derek and Beth finally sort out at the cabin. The siblings’ austere temporary quarters are darkened with robust ink strokes and sapphire paint washes, and Lemire revisits the type of familial responsibility that bubbled to the surface in his magnificent graphic novel The Underwater Welder three years before he finished Roughneck. Tucked deep into richly visualized woods, Derek commits to shielding Beth from the kind of danger that characterized their past. But he’ll need to do it without so much as throwing a single punch.

From Royal City by Jeff Lemire (image courtesy of Image Comics)

Royal City, one of Lemire’s several monthly comics, abounds with sentimental overtones and supernatural flourishes that mirror those in The Underwater Welder. Here, the artist chronicles domestic strife and a reckoning with the past à la Roughneck. When a stroke lands their father in the hospital, the three adult Pike children and their mother grapple with a fracturing present and the traumatic years behind them. The full-color first arc of Royal City isn’t without problems, but this is only part of an already evocative drama that takes shape just within the muted facades of a small factory town’s ranch houses and riverside smokestacks.

Graying husband and father Peter Pike collapses in his workshop overnight while repairing one of the scores of antique tabletop wood-cased radios that line its organized shelves. Static, which Lemire relates as swirling smoke trails, filters out of the radio’s dusty speaker grill. It’s punctuated by the voice of a child.

“Daddy?”

The voice belongs to Peter’s son Tommy, who died when he was just 14. His ghost is integral to Lemire’s script. Tommy is drawn like a flesh-and-blood character, and for reasons that connect directly to their own struggles, each family member experiences visits from differently aged versions of his restless spirit.

From Royal City by Jeff Lemire (image courtesy of Image Comics)

Blocked author and oldest adult son Patrick Pike returns to his hometown, Royal City — and to its accompanying baggage — when he hears about his dad. He visits with a lanky version of Tommy at the age of his death and looks to him for his next novel’s source material. His sister Tara, an ambitious land developer, meets regularly with a young, pajama-clad version of their dead brother, who has a spiky crop of yellow hair. The alcoholic screw-up Pike son, Richie, is gaunt and unshaven, with perpetual troubles and lines under his eyes that lend him a look of fatigue not entirely unlike Derek Ouelette’s. Richie drinks with an older version of Tommy who never came to pass. Owing to a recent blunder, their mother Patti’s considerable guilt yields a version of Tommy as the priest she hoped he’d become, a wholesome figure to whom she looks for absolution and forgiveness.

“Priest” Tommy and his mother clutch a rosary in Peter’s dismal gray-and-algae-green hospital room. The scene follows a lush, dreamlike interlude in which the unconscious father stands on a two-page-length street corner, surrounded by building-sized replicas of the Philco vintage radios he resuscitates in his workshop. Three inset panels layered atop the big ornate consoles reveal antennas that are broadcasting Peter’s own pre-teen version of Tommy.

No family member knows of the others’ encounters with Tommy, and he’s never in the room with more than one relative. The first issue’s narration borrows from his 1993-era journal, which Patrick carries with him and mines for book ideas. Its wide-ruled pages suggest that the youngest Pike took his own life.

“Would anybody notice if I wasn’t even here at all?” Tommy writes.

From Royal City by Jeff Lemire (image courtesy of Image Comics)

Royal City’s characters feel familiar to me, and their pining for days gone by is a relatable notion, even while some of their present-day hurdles feel forced. Pat’s battles with his literary agent are well-worn clichés, and Tara’s marital discord owes mostly to her land-development proposal — one that you’d never risk a relationship over. But these conflicts accentuate the story’s notes of nostalgia and reverence for adolescence. Pat’s novel will keep Tommy’s story alive, and a reckless real estate deal would surely disrupt the unassuming suburb’s quaint aesthetic — the way they know it, the way it’s always looked. This is borne out in precise architectural details of the row homes and factory mills that spill over into the comic’s inside front and back covers.

Clad in a Nirvana shirt, Patrick “wanders the house [he] grew up in like a museum” in the fourth issue. He ponders his family’s inability to fully move on since their loss, and in impressive, abstract illustrations that open the comic, he embodies their state of limbo and his own, locked between his adult self and the “person [he] worked so hard to leave behind.” Like Derek and Beth Ouelette, Pat’s family make a go at unshackling themselves from the past, but it isn’t easy. There’s comfort for the Pikes in the years gone by — before the walls of adulthood closed in, back when they still had their baby brother.

“How old is too old to start over?” asks Pat at the water’s edge. Lemire breaks up the river’s temperate wash of purple and navy blue hues with inked squiggly ripples. “At what point does all the shit I’ve done weigh me down so much I can’t move forward anymore?”

Roughneck is now available from Gallery 13. Issues 1 through 5 of Royal City are now available from Image Comics and will be collected in trade paperback in September.

The post A Comic Artist Draws on Emotional Isolation and Domestic Strife appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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