Schiff Bases & Etsy Pressures

Tuberose has been renamed Agave amica from the previous Polianthus tuberosa. Some botanists hashed it out and published the new nomenclature in Phytotaxa, Vol. 306 No. 3: 12 May 2017. Make a note. 

These taxonomy changes happen every so often, and most suppliers are slow to pick up the new Latin when they do. It's best to use both the old and the new when listing the raw material to avoid confusion, just until everyone gets used to the change. 

It's been a busy research morning, and it's not even remotely over yet. I even used my own book, WTB II, as a reference! Now I'm jumping down the Schiff base rabbit hole. That ought to keep me busy for a minute. I have gathered the materials necessary to potentially create a few Schiff bases, all that's left, after the mixing, is to wait and evaporate, and in some cases, heat and evaporate. Since there is almost nothing to be found online about creating Schiff bases using naturals, I'm going to have to dive into experimentation to find out if it can even be done. Time seems to be the major component here, and if you know me, you know patience isn't a virtue that I possess in abundance.

UPDATE! 11-6-2022 I spoke with a perfumery chemist friend of mine who says Schiff bases CAN be made with naturals in combination with natural isolates. Tricky little tightrope, that. 

One of my favorite soapmakers, Anastasia, aka eleneetha on Etsy, has packed up her soap molds, probably permanently for all online purchasing. I understand the pressure she is under 100%.  Etsy's system of ranking sellers with their star seller awards, and customer service badges -- it's a lot. Not to mention the increase in costs from listing prices to transaction fees and processing fees, and they're always pushing sellers to offer deep discounts and free shipping on just about everything. If you're dealing in high-quality, top-drawer stuff combined with Etsy's depressing system of rewarding an artist for good behavior on their platform -- well, like I said, it's a lot. And then there are the reviews. All it takes is for someone to just not like what you sent and nothing else; a matter of 'just not my cup of tea' giving your shop a one or two-star rating to ruin the whole thing, as well as temporarily tank your confidence. I could rail for paragraphs about the stupid reasons someone gave me a lower-than-5-star rating, but what's the point? People do jerky stuff and don't think of the consequences their opinion has on the seller. I've done this to other sellers myself because I was having a bad day or really felt they hadn't given it their best effort, and I regret it now having been on the receiving end more than once. I've not done it since without good reason, such as a total misrepresentation of the items purchased, or really long shipping times (really long = 30 days+) without any communication from the seller. And last, and perhaps the most important, is the pressure from so-called loyal customers to make, make, make, to the point of threatening to buy elsewhere if they feel unheard, leave a bad review with a low-star rating, or worse, creating the thing they requested and letting them know it's available only to have them respond with, "Oh, thanks, but I don't really want it anymore." That's happened more times than I can count over the past 16 years on Etsy. You would think I'd know better, get a deposit or something. 

See? Told you I could go on and on with this. Oh! And one more thing -- the raw materials to make all these wonderful aromatic goods has gone up three times what they were in 2020, some well into the prohibitively expensive bracket. So there is that too.