Adventure! Excitement! Exotic locations! Soap! Okay, so maybe just the last part. If we don't physically travel to the most distant ports of call in search of exotic ingredients, the modern age makes it easy for us to linger in an older age of exploration, mystery and luxury. So we prefer to make our bath products with a difference, to harken to a Victorian age that never was, to a pulp era that only ever saw print, to pay homage to Verne and Kipling, Wells and Doyle - and maybe add in a healthy dose of Chandler and Hammett too. What does this have to do with soaps and body scrubs, you ask? Not a thing...but it's what inspires us, and we believe in sharing the things we love.

Silk Road Trading Company manufactures gloriously luxuriant soaps, sugar scrubs and bath powders created with the finest environmentally-responsible ingredients, including palm kernel oil farmed from organic, environmentally sustainable fair-trade farms in Brazil, organic jojoba oil from Arizona and fair-trade shea butter from Togo, Africa. Our products are completely free of artificial colors or paraben-based preservatives, and are blissfully lacking in petroleum, silicon, or other unwholesome fillers. We make everything we sell from scratch, in small batches, scented with the finest oils and (in the case of our soaps at least) individually hand-cut, stamped and wrapped. Treat yourself to a blissfully indulgent luxury. You deserve it!

A new year brings a new web site design. We loved the old one, but it was increasingly clear that it was not exactly friendly when it came to growth and expansion, something we hope to do a lot of in 2008. We've broadened our catalog to include our Sugar Scrub Marmalades for all our regular soaps, and added Chapter 2 to the permanent catalog. Many of you have undoubtedly also noticed that we've begun shrink-wrapping our soaps to preserve their longevity, so you can keep them for longer in that soap stash without worry of them going bad (provided you don’t open the shrink-wrap, of course.)

This update also brings with it four new limited edition soaps for Valentine's Day that we really love (we're gooey sentimental romantics when it comes to Valentine's Day.) They can be ordered individually, as a matching set, and we're offering sugar scrub marmalades in the same scents.

In other news, we have a few of our Winter 2007 Holiday soaps left. These are now being offered on a first-come first-served basis on our shopping cart. We wil not be taking backorders on these, once they're gone they're gone.

Happy explorations!