Category: Uncategorized

#10. The colour of lavender soap

The first time I saw and smelled a real lavender 1 plant was in the year 1986. The plant was growing against the outside wall of the gîte rural 2, where I stayed for some weeks together with my family. It was the only plant there. The gîte was located in the surroundings of the (then) small village with the name La Roche-de-Glun 3 in the department Drôme 4 in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes 5 region of southeastern France.

The small shrub where I found the name of later, was bathing the entire day in the heat of the sun, and despite that it never looked as if it was in a need for water. Used to the wealthy-leaved shrubs in Dutch gardens, I was touched by the heat-resistant leaves of this one, and their colour: greyish green. The unique, fresh, strong, uplifting, relaxing, wonderful, charming smell has since then become my favourite one. The colour of the lavender flowers is light purple, violet 6.

Photo by Anastasia Shuraeva from Pexels
Photo by Anastasia Shuraeva from Pexels

Since I am working with herbs from Crete, I searched for Cretan lavender, and found on the website “Wild Herbs of Crete” 7, a blogpost about it 8. According to this blogpost there are two different kinds of lavender: the Lavandula Stoechas, which seems to smell sweeter, and the Lavandula Vera. I assume that Lavandula Vera [“vera”, which is Italian for “true”] is the same as Lavandula Angustifolia 9, also known as Lavandula Officinalis. For my Cretan-Garden.shop I use Greek lavender, the Greek Lavandula Angustifolia.

The colour of natural lavender soap

When one googles on images with “lavender soap”, one is overwhelmed with the colour violet, or purple, not only because of the purple wrappers or boxes, but also because the soaps are purple or violet. When I started to make lavender soap, by infusing 15 litres of organic olive oil with 720 grams of dried lavender flowers, I was curious how the colour of the olive oil would become after three months of infusing, pulverising the filtered-infused lavender and adding the result back into the infused oil. The colour is black. Not purple. The liquid soap is as all herbal soaps this colour, and dried it has a beige / khaki colour. Not purple.

When the infused oil becomes soap during the saponification process the almost black colour turns into orange/brown, sometimes, that depends on the herb, it is red/brown. The colour of the lavender soap becomes even lighter than the colour of the other herbal soaps. The smell however is not lesser strong. On the contrary. Important to know is that the skin-nourishing ingredients of extra virgin olive oil, organic herbs, and essential oils are not affected in the saponification process.

Whenever you would like to have a violet coloured bar of lavender soap, and you find one, be aware that the colour is not natural, but synthetic. Often even perfumes, which contain synthetic fragrances, or pure synthetic fragrances have been added  to mislead you even more.

Handcrafted lavender soap smells the same as the lavender plant. How does lavender smell? The scent of the lavender plant is strong, charismatic, and intensely botanical. Underlying its floral sweetness are green and spicy notes, and a woody accent 10. When a herbal soap comes in a contact with water the smells of the ingredients become more active. After washing, showering or bathing the smell slowly disappears: natural smells evaporate quickly when they are exposed to the air. Only when you would use your own body-oil, in this case your own lavender body-oil 11— the smell of the lavender essential oil will accompany you for a longer time, in a modest way, and will not —like a strong “cloud” of perfumes and fragrances that fill the air— disturb others: not everybody likes the same smells. Be aware of what kind of smell you “wear” when you are going to spend time in nature. Perfumes and fragrances do not fit there.

The toxic truth about perfumes and fragrances

“The toxic truth about perfumes and fragrances” is the title of a blog post, written by Karen Kingston. Since I agree with every word and sentence, I would like to recommend this blog post. You can click here to read the post.

Footnotes

  1. Lavender – Britannica dictionary ↩︎
  2. Gîte rural – Wikipedia ↩︎
  3. La Roche-de-Glun – Wikipedia ↩︎
  4. Drôme – Wikipedia ↩︎
  5. Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes – Wikipedia ↩︎
  6. Violet (colour) – Wikipedia ↩︎
  7. Wild Herbs of Crete – Website ↩︎
  8. Greek Lavender – Website Wild Herbs of Crete ↩︎
  9. Lavandula Angustifolia – Wikipedia ↩︎
  10. Lavender – Cretan Garden, Page Lavender ↩︎
  11. Body oil – Cretan Garden recipe for a home made skin conditioner ↩︎

#6. The Minoan Lady

In September 2015, I was for a week on the island of Crete, Greece, and visited Knossos, and the Minoan Palace, the largest Bronze Age archaeological site 1. I had already seen many pictures of the palace on the web, but when there I was touched by the atmosphere in a surprising way. Because thousands of tourists visit this site day after day, and so many tourist buses and cars fill the parking spaces, I expected that it would become a noisy, stressful experience, but the visitors were silent, calm, and did not even talk with each other. The atmosphere was so intensely peaceful that it is justified to compare the site with a sacred place. I remember what I once read about powerful energy spots on earth, in the magnetic field of the earth, in the soils, and all the layers beneath the surface.

Monasteries were also built on these special spots. Stonehenge 2  is another example. The Minoans who lived in the palace of Knossos were highly civilised, not only rationally, but also spiritually. Priestesses were also living in the palace of Knossos, an enormous complexity of buildings with even four storeys. The Minoan Lady, also named La Parisienne, was a priestess 3 . The text continues below the picture.

The Camp Stool fresco (reconstruction), c. 1350 B.C.E., from west wing of the palace of Knossos (Archaeological Museum of Heraklion, Crete) – Source: Smart History – Copyrights: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Cretan Garden

Cretan-Garden

When I decided to start a webshop to sell soaps made out of Cretan olive oil4, herbs and essential oils, and searching for a picture that could be used for the logo, the icon in the media and blog, my thoughts went almost immediately to that one picture 5 that I made in the Archaeological Museum in Heraklion, in 2015. It was an intuitive choice. For me, the Minoan Lady was and is what I would like to represent in my products: ethics, values, respect, dignity, aesthetics, beauty.

It is a pity that I lost the article that I once read about Minoan priestesses in Knossos and their role in the herbal garden: only priestesses were allowed to pick the herb salvia fruticosa, or Greek sage. For that sage ritual, they had to wear a white dress, because that herb was holy. When I smelled dried Greek sage some years ago -for the first time in my life- I understood. Because of that intense aroma, I also understand why it is used in rituals to clean the atmosphere in rooms, in buildings with negative energies, graveyards, in a diversity of cultures, worldwide 6.

The use of soap in the Minoan Civilization

It is not certain if the Minoan Lady used soap herself. There is nothing written about the use of soap in the palace of Knossos, though the first soaps seem to have been made in Greece, during the Minoan times. Here are some articles with information that explain, for instance, the use of salt in bathing rituals:

“Before modern medicine, salt water treated patients as a healing remedy. Before the modern spa day, firm believers in its healing created the concept of therapeutic bathing. In order to cleanse the body, they infused salt with herbal blends, lavender and bay laurel leaves that extracted daily toxins. Another contribution salt progressed into was basic soap making. Dated around 2800 BC, the Greeks were one of the first soap makers who created mixtures of alkaline salts with local vegetable oils, animal fats and wood ashes to form soaps and detergents. By contrast, today an individual uses soap for bathing or personal hygiene. In ancient times, it was produced for cleaning cooking utensils, goods and medicinal purposes.” 7

“The oldest archaeological findings in Europe related to bathing habits date from the Bronze Age (2,400–800 BC). In the palaces of Knossos and Phaistos in Crete, the population of the Aegean Minoan civilisation left traces of special chambers devoted to bathing. Alabaster bathtubs excavated in Akrotiri (on Santorini Island), as well as washing basins and feet baths, showed how people from the Minoan civilisation maintained their personal hygiene.” 8

“Lustral Basins were first identified by Arthur Evans 9 at Knossos and consist of a sunken rectangular room reached by an L-shaped or dog-legged stairway. There is often a balustrade running alongside the stairway, normally ending with a pilaster supporting a column. All the examples at Knossos, like the one at Mallia (above), were lined with gypsum and so Evans thought they were used for bathing—a clay tub was even found in one of them. However, a few of them were found in areas of the palace; the Throne Room, for example, where relaxing in the tub seems unlikely. In those cases, Evans believed they were used for ritual purification through lustration—hence the name” 10

Additional information

  1. Minoan woman or goddess from the palace of Knossos (“La Parisienne”) – Khan Academy
  2. Appendix Two, La Parisienne – Erenow, Biographies and Memoires
  3. Journal article – Water, Fertility and Purification in Minoan Religion – Oxford University Press
  4. How ‘ritual’ were the Palaces? – The Secret of Civilization
  5. Minoan Religion, Ritual, Image and Symbol – Nanno Marinatos, Academia
  6. Hydro-technologies in the Minoan Era – IWA
  7. Minoan civilization – YouTube playlist
  8. Archaeological Museum Heraklion – Photo album Flickr
  9. Minoan Art, Archaeological Museum Heraklion – Photo album Flickr
  10. Herbs for health and beauty in Minoan Crete – Explore Crete
  11. The Minoan Harem : the Role of Eminent Women and the Knossos Frescoes [article] – Nanno Marinatos
  12. Cretan-Garden olive oil soaps – Webshop

Footnotes

  1. The archaeological site of Knossos, Crete – Photo album Flickr ↩︎
  2. Stonehenge – Wikipedia ↩︎
  3. Knossos and the Minoan Civilization – World History ↩︎
  4. Cretan-Garden olive oil soaps – Webshop ↩︎
  5. Picture Minoan Lady – Flickr ↩︎
  6. Salvia fruticosa and rituals – Scholarly articles ↩︎
  7. Importance of salt in Ancient Greece – Greek Boston ↩︎
  8. Ancient Greek and Roman bathing – Blog Stella ↩︎
  9. Sir Arthur Evans and Minoan Crete – Nanno Marinatos ↩︎
  10. Lustral Basins in Knossos – Odyssey ↩︎

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