the handmade soap masters

In the ten years or so I’ve been “talking” to other people on the Internet, I have received something like twenty thousand email enquiries about “natural” skincare, handmade soap, or some other topic that can be broadly classified as pertinent to sustainable choices for personal and household products.

For the vast majority, these queries appear to come from people who have an honest and perfectly legitimate desire of better understanding these issues. However, some of the questions I have been asked were “questionable” at the very minimum —if not decidedly suss.

As so many other negative behaviours, both on the ‘net and in real life, suss queries seem to be enjoying vast popularity. So does the number of shonky “customers” I find myself dealing with —and it’s probably silly of me to keep listening and doing my best to answer…

But anyway, the time seems to have come for me to start collecting the most interesting, strange, provocative and outrageous questions people ask me, and publish them in a new category of this Blog journal, called Cosmic Questions. I hope this will both contribute to the general knowledge about natural soap, chemical-free skincare and sustainable options, and maybe also raise a few smiles…

And on a side note —I’ll have to better qualify what I mean by natural and sustainable one of these days!

Suss: Australian slang for suspect or suspicious, fishy.
Shonky: Australian slang for less than transparent, somewhat dishonest, fishy.