MusK gift set, Merry Christmas

A merry Christmas is easy to recognise by its scent — cinnamon, orange and fir needles. The set packs it into a small MuSK gift box made of kraft paper with the words “Používajte s láskou” (Use with love): a soap, a shampoo bar, an essential oil blend for the diffuser and a ceramic soap dish that gives the soap somewhere to live.

Three scents, one common thread

That thread is cinnamon — you will find it in the soap, in the shampoo bar and in the bottle. Christmas Cottage is a vegan soap shaped like a little gingerbread house, with a cinnamon stick for a chimney, and it smells of sweet orange and Ceylon cinnamon; every cottage is decorated on its own. The cinnamon stick is purely decorative — take it out when you start using the cottage.

The Scent of Christmas shampoo bar (40 g) comes in a box of its own, and although it is solid like soap, it is not soap: it washes hair with gentle surfactants derived from coconut oil. To the cinnamon it adds lime, fir, lemongrass and star anise — again from essential oils, not from a fragrance blend.

The Merry Christmas essential oil blend shares its name with the set and brings together fir, sweet orange, cinnamon, star anise and lemongrass in a 10 ml bottle. A few drops in a diffuser are enough for a room; undiluted, it does not belong on the skin, and the bottle should be kept out of children's reach. Meanwhile, the cottage sits on the ceramic Christmas bauble soap dish from the Keramika Greško workshop: a hand-painted bauble with a cap decorated in real gold and a heart-shaped cut-out that drains the water away from under the soap.

Straight talk: the cottage, the shampoo bar and the oil blend are scented with essential oils only, which is why they also contain natural fragrance allergens — not added substances but part of the plants themselves. Our article on allergens in cosmetics explains why there is no need to turn them into a bogeyman.

Rinse the soap dish now and then and wipe it dry so no water sits in the cut-out. You will find more festive shapes among our Christmas soaps. To lather is human. Smelling of cinnamon all through Advent is human too.