Economics

We spent a lot of time on Thursday trying to figure out where we can get the things we need at the best possible price.  After all, there is no never-ending penny in either of our pockets, so we must try to be careful.

First, we are in no way connected with any supplier, so the information we share is not intended to promote any particular business or individual.  We are just sharing what we are finding, and we hope that if anyone reads our blog and knows of something better, then he or she will share that with us.

This week, the best price for olive oil and coconut oil that we could find was at Sam's Club.  We know a couple of people locally who own restaurants, so we are going to check with them this week about their prices and suppliers for oils.

We checked on Amazon.com, but discovered something interesting.  One of us has a Prime account and one does not.  We were on our individual computers checking prices, and our computers were each displaying a different price for the same product...hmmm...

We are going to make our first attempt at using colors for artistic effects (we will try to share video), so we needed to purchase a variety of colors.  We found a good variety with good prices and helpful directions on brambleberry.com.  That site also had better prices for sweet almond and palm oils.  We really love the things we have purchased from brambleberry.com; we just wish that the labels on the bottles had the amounts written on them.  Also, with this purchase we found a few fragrances on sale that we couldn't pass up.  We just wish it would get here faster!  We placed the order on Thursday afternoon, and when the order shipped confirmation came through, the tracking information indicated that it will arrive the following Friday - 8 days later.

One new (to us) site that we discovered is based in Indiana - http://lebermuth.com/. We found the best prices here for essential oils.  Be prepared, though.  There is no minimum required order, but if you order less than $300 in products, there will be a $20 fee.  Even with that fee and shipping charges, we found the price at this site to be the best for the essential oils that we wanted.  The site is organized extremely well, and it is very easy to find the oils that will work well for soap.  Material Safety Data Sheets are available for the products with the click of a button.

We want to try some fragrances as well as essential oils, so we also compared prices for fragrance oils.  We found a better price for those at http://www.naturesgardencandles.com/.  The organization of this site is also very helpful.  You can search for scents alphabetically or by type (bakery, fruit, seasons, etc). You can even search by color; for example, pink scents include fragrances like cashmere, bubblegum, "Dare to be Sexy," fluffy pink candy, or floral bouquet.  This Web store offered a discount of $1 per bottle if we ordered at least 5 bottles of 16 oz.  Having never ordered from this company before, we can't comment on the quality of their products (we're about to find out), but the product reviews that we read sound promising.

There are a few other sites that we really LOVE, and we love the products that they offer.  We just aren't quite ready to spend the money that their products cost.  Maybe we'll talk about those on another day.

Again, we are not employees of any of the above mentioned sites and we have no vested interest in them (other than being interested in which one has the cheapest prices on the things we need!).  Hope this helps.