Today I made body oils; this consisted of pasteurising coconut and avocado oil (I basically heat it up to 72C and hold it at that temperature for five minutes.

The Chocolate Body Oils are very popular down here in Toledo for the tourist market since cocoa (cacao) is a major commodity down here.

In keeping with our philosophy, I cut, glue and paste every single label.  It is my hope that my positivity in working will infuse into the product from beginning to end.

We live in a wooden house in the Tropics (in the bush…think Sean Connery in Medicine Man…yes, we do live like that!) so I have to obsessively protect my wares from the environment.  One particular problem is a bug which looks like a metallic shiny green robot bug (looks exactly like StarBug from Red Dwarf, if you know what I am talking about); it hovers and buzzes around all my precious boxes looking to plant mud everywhere to build nests.  You can spot him a mile away with its back legs trailing mud everywhere and it makes a continuous droning noise like an electric screw-driver.  Truth be told, they are actually rather “cute” in a buggy sort of way and if you look at them, they are not menacing or predatory like the biting bugs of Belize.  They just act as if they are messy little bugs that mean  you no harm but like to smear mud everywhere. They have made too much of a mess of my products that as a consequence, I have had to cover all my products in plastic.  I used to wrap things up in brown paper bags in boxes but these bugs seem to be attracted to anything made out of paper.