To Come: Updated Review for Pheonix Botanicals' Jasmine Beauty Balm

Just a quick post to let you know I'll be doing an updated, solo review of the Jasmine Beauty Balm. After reading my review, Pheonix Botanicals had some questions, specifically about the balm making me break out. I agreed to give it another trial run in order to give them more thorough feedback.

Unfortunately, I was delayed by first the onset of my seasonal breakout (every season change. Never fails.), then by a several silly things (guests, changes in schedule, a nasty cold that quite frankly makes me hate everything, sheer laziness) that are really no excuse but that nevertheless prevented me from maintaining a routine. In order to make myself accountable, I'm updating you all on my intentions.

Beginning today, I'll be applying the balm twice a day - once while I get ready for my day, and once before bed, after washing my face. I'm not currently in the midst of a break-out, and I'll be giving it a two-week trial, no other changes in routine/diet, so it should be pretty fair.

We'll see how it goes!

Review: BumbleBerry Honey Maple Creme

Before I get started on the review, here's a bit about BumbleBerry Farms, from their website:

Here at BumbleBerry Farms, we take our lead from
the bees – one hive can collectively travel as many as 55,000 miles visiting more than two million flowers to
gather the nectar needed for one single pound of our Heritage Select Honey! With that same care and diligence, our honeycomb is hand-spun to gently release the sweet honey we offer up to you – bottled in vintage-inspired, cork-stoppered glass bottles.

We’re a small operation, located in the foothills of Pennsylvania’s Laurel Mountains, and as such, we craft everything ourselves in small batches. We hand-select the ingredients for our delectable honey-based spreads from a dairy farm and a maple sugar camp just down the road. Our skin care products are kept simple, using fair-trade, organic butters whenever we can get them…like our shea butter, which is harvested by women, the sole supporters of their communities in the Burkina Faso region of West Africa.

We are forever grateful to family and friends who have helped us along the way, lending their children for photo shoots, helping us in our festival booths, volunteering as testers for products in the making. With that same nod toward giving others a lift up, we follow their lead and offer
a Honey Bee Good jar of our yummiest nectar with profits benefitting a local charity. Currently we’re supporting Outdoor Odyssey at Roaring Run, a youth mentoring and leadership development program.

We hope you enjoy your BumbleBerry goods and that
you will do as we attempt to do:

Spread a little sweetness on the planet. Bee happy. ^TM

                         .                                                                                                           Sounds great, doesn't it? I have a special place in my heart for bees, and a special place in my stomach for honey. I adore both and am happy to do what I can to help keep bees (and honey) around for years to come, especially in light of the drastically declining number of bee colonies. And supporting charity, of course, is always fantastic.

Which is why it makes me feel a bit down about writing a less-than-stellar review. But, in the interest of providing an unbiased opinion, here we go:

The big, bad problem here was graininess. Why was it grainy? I don't know. What were the grains, anyway? Again, I don't know. They were a tiny bit sweet, but definitely not sugar. Some sort of strange combination of milk proteins and maple syrup crystals, perhaps? If they were properly sweet, like, say, pure maple sugar, I'd probably have just enjoyed it. Graininess itself, while not what I expect in a spread, doesn't inherently bother me. However, these Mystery Grains took ages to melt in my mouth, had no real flavour or sweetness, and were all around more suited for some sort of sticky bath exfoliant than a food item.

Not to be deterred, I decided that despite the lack of sweetness, the Mystery Grains were probably sugar-based in some way - clearly they had crystallized, and could, theoretically, be melted down again. So I tried microwaving some of the spread, in two batches: one, in a quick hot burst, and another over several short bursts, stirring thoroughly in between. Both ended up bubbly and sticky. And both remained as grainy as ever. Now, it's possible that if I scooped the spread out into a saucepan, and simmered and stirred it slowly for an hour or so, that the Mystery Grains would eventually melt down. But in that case, I might as well be making my own, thus removing the main benefit of a prepared spread in the first place.

Then, there was the taste. It was fine, a nice milky caramel sort of flavour. If I'd ordered a plain caramel spread, I'd be delighted. But there was very little, if any, maple taste, which was what I'd been wanting in the first place. Perhaps all the maple flavour was eaten up by the Mystery Grains.

Anyway, thinking that the creme might have been near expiry, I checked the date on the bottom, which said: BEST BY 111315. Originally I'd assumed that it was good until November 13th, 2015. I don't see how it could mean 2013, since the 13 is in the middle, but it seems possible somehow, especially since I ordered it at the beginning of the year and it came from a secondary supplier (Mouth). Who knows how long it's been sitting in a warehouse? Plus, BumbleBerry's website features the creme with a distinctly different label. I don't know. It didn't taste off, but... those damned GRAINS!

I may be making a big deal out of a simple thing. If there's a quick way to fix the weird graininess, let me know, and I'll try it out. If it works, I'll adjust the review accordingly! But until then:

5/10. Decent taste (but a bit bland and not what I expected); texture made unpalatable by millions of Mystery Grains.

If you want to give it a go anyway (I'm so perplexed that I think I might order it directly from the website and see if the new batch is any better) you can buy it from BumbleBerry Farms at $8.50/5oz plus shipping, or from Mouth, as I did originally, at $13/10oz plus shipping.