Rejoice and live in your skin again!
Packaging for gifts and mailing.
When mailing out non-gift purchases, depending on the number of soap bars and other products in the order, we place the soaps in a plain kraft bag to contain them and then place them in the shipping box with paper, bubble wrap or packing peanuts (all from recycled sources) for protection. A dented and banged up bar is not how we'd like your soap to arrive. However, many times we have customers tell us they don't mind the dings and dents, to just stick the soaps in the smallest box or a padded envelope and mail it, no extra padding or wrapping! Our Farmers Market Customers do the same, just stick it in thier pockets, market bags or purses.
Gift baskets and boxes are where we (and you) splurge a bit. You want your gift to say something and we'll help you say it, but as environmentally friendly as possible. When making a gift basket or box, we strive to use components that are created from as much recycled material as possible. The availability of natural filler and wrapping materials being manufactured from recycled paper products and recycled wood shavings has increased dramatically in the last 5 years and the quality is as good if not better than many "virgin" products.
The one known exception to this is our Kraft window boxes. These cute little boxes are "virgin paperboard" and are much better than recycled boxes. These food grade boxes allow us to make adorable gift boxes and still maintain our standards of minimal packaging with much less impact to the environment. The boxes are non-bleached and use 25-30% less fiber than other box materials. While not recycled, these boxes use less material than common board boxes, aren't bleached with strong chemicals, and have an organic look true to their environmentally responsible make-up. They are a good green solution, unquestionably safe for food which makes them a superb gift box packaging for our soaps and other Bath & Body products.
For more information on these boxes, please read here: BRB Boxes 
Handcrafted Soaps
Natural
Bath & Body
Botanica Basics believes that while soap and cosmetic packaging should be as minimal as
possible, we must acknowledge, adapt to and accommodate the very weighty but important issues of our customers safety, global labeling regulations and our products integrity.
Our Handcrafted Soaps:
Our Scentless Planet Unfragranced Soaps are wrapped completely, end to end, to protect them from absorbing the fragrances of our scented soaps. Our fragranced bars are wrapped with open ended shrink wrap to protect the bars and then we label them. You can see and smell the soap and most importantly, read the ingredient list. While there are many who sell naked, unlabeled soap bars, that is just not condusive to our way of doing business. Why? We are a firm believer in full disclosure ingredient listings.
Because while true soap -if only claiming it's soap, it cleans-is covered under the regulations of the Consumer Product Safety Commission and isn't required to have the ingredients listed, if a cosmetic claim of any kind is made, soap is also then regulated by the USFDA and must have the ingredients listed. If someone has issues or sensitivities with certain ingredients, they need to know what's in the soap. Naked bars means a lack of an ingredients list or a hodgepodge list on a handout sheet of "may contain..." or a series of "and/or..." as far as ingredients go. That is not a complete or even the legal way to list cosmetics ingredients. Ingredient handouts next to a soap display mean nothing. While that may be -to some- better than nothing, depending on store clerks to restock or hand out the correct ingredient lists takes away from a customer's immediate right to know what's in a product. And if given as a gift, how would the recipient know what's in the soap? Also, to us, naked bars are very unsanitary. People handle the soap at the Farmers Markets, festivals and in the stores that carry our soaps. The soap must be transported to theses venues. Yes, it's soap, it can and will be rinsed off. But we think your soap should be as clean as possible when you get it.
Our Butters, Balms and other non soap products:
We use either plastic PET or HDPE (#1 & #2) tubes, jars and pump bottles for most of our other products. Many are food grade. Using these allows our customers to:
1. Have a better protected product. Certain types of plastic containers do not hold up well with regard to stability and protection of natural/natural based Bath & Body products.
2. PET (#1) and HDPE (#2) are the most common plastic materials that recycling centers accept. Depending on the region, finding recyling centers that accept all plastics (#1-6) is not easy. Here in Polk County, MO, our centers only take plastics #1 and #2. And in many areas, the further away from large cities, the harder it is. In fact, many major metro areas don't even have recyling centers. Our customers shouldn't have to worry about this. So we try to make it easier for them by using PET and HDPE so they can be turned into the local recyling centers. While we would love to be able to accept the empty containers to recycle, reuse or even refill them for our local customers, we do not have the necessary space, logistical, legal and most importantly, the sterilization capabilities for doing this.
With the exception of our roll on perfunes, we do not use glass in any form! While glass has the utmost in recycling capabilities, because of it's weight, glass adds 120% or more to shipping charges. Plus, glass in a bathroom is dangerous! We wrote on this in a past blog post. If you missed it when we first wrote about it, when you get a chance, please read it.
