Q: What are the scent notes for "X"?
A: Specific scent notes are trade secret. Our new accords are foundational for us, so this was done to protect against copycats or ripoffs. The accord summary is the biggest clue you get, and the accompanied journal entry may also provide hints. This approach also makes experiencing and exploring a scent significantly more meaningful.
Q: My EDT causes a slight weakness feeling, what is that about?
A: This is a response from the body that can occur when you apply any spray fragrance to exposed skin. Alcohol and DPG penetrate the lipid barrier of the skin, and rapidly increases skin absorption. Fragrance and essential oil both contain dozens, if not hundreds of individual compounds. Who you are as an individual determines what level of threat these foreign aromatics get painted as - and chances are extremely low in either case for fragrance or essential oil to be the true culprit for something like immediate muscle weakness, that label goes to the alcohol.
That sudden weakness is your body getting a massive influx of foreign invader data, and your central nervous system has a limited bandwidth to process it. To make room to deal with this blast of ethanol and aroma chemicals, your body sends a signal to relax the muscles - muscle weakness. Your body is immediately saying "Woah, woah, woah, what is all this?" Once it realizes no damage is being done to cells, that its just a neurotransmitter overload, your muscle weakness starts to return to normal. After sensory overload, inflammation and cell death is assessed - it see's none, so that bandwidth used to assess the damage is given back to the muscle fibers.
If your cells were actually getting damaged, the body would react far differently. Actual sensitization causes a lower pain threshold, where light touches or contacts genuinely burns or hurts. This is not muscle weakness, this is tissue damage. Pain, tenderness, swelling, redness, blisters, peeling, and progressively getting worse - these are the real signs. This is your body telling you to stay far away from whatever you just put on your body - the ethanol, the fragrance, the essential oil - something has to be avoided. For many people cinnamon bark and clove essential oils do this, for others its specific fragrances that do this - specifically its a compound group or isolated compound doing the damage, not necessarily the entire matrix as a whole. In fact this is why imitation essential oil exists, the aggressive compounds are stripped from the original. It is the height of irony that artisans like us have to deal with. Some all-natural purists will crucify an artisan for using imitation cinnamon fragrance instead of "the real stuff", not knowing that the imitation fragrance was made from the real stuff, and made safer. This is called fractional distillation in the industry, and your skin is grateful for it.
Your body does not discriminate - whether it is a synthetic compound in fragrance or a natural pesticide metabolite in essential oil, it is still a chemical - and it's being shuttled in ethanol, which is doing the most damage. If you fit this bill, either do not use spray fragrance at all, or spray your clothing instead to shield your skin.
Q: My product seems to be getting darker over time, is this normal?
A: Yes. Certain fragrances contain vanilla or vanillin, which darkens over time due to environmental oxidation. This is purely aesthetic.
Q: Is the Etsy storefront closed?
A: We have officially closed the Etsy storefront. We broke free from Amazon, and now we are free from Etsy. The site is now the one and only place to buy AVSC goods, but you can also use the shop portal if you want to.
Q: What happened to the reward program?
A: The reward system has been shrunk and consolidated. The previous system was almost never used, so we made it much easier and more simple to save on AVSC. New customers can use code NEW10 at checkout to get 10% off. If you join the newsletter found at the bottom of The Soap Box, you can use the code NEWSLETTER at checkout to get 15% off. As long as you are subscribed, you can always use this discount code. You can also use the referral system to gift a $10 coupon to someone. If they convert on a $50 order or higher, you get a $10 coupon too.
Q: What are the ingredients?
A: All ingredients for all products can be found in the ingredient index.
Q: Is there any unscented?
A: Unscented versions of the core line of products will return, eventually. It is overwhelmingly the lowest volume SKU, so our scented line had to take complete priority. There is no timeline exactly on it's return, but we will try to introduce unscented again before 2027.
Q: What happened to Zeppelin? Fir needle? The previous scents?
A: The essential oil scents from the last few years have finally been officially retired. It was high time to return to fragrance, using essential oil from here on out is dead. The sales data indicated that for us at least, customers preferred our approach to fragrance over essential oil.