Hi all, The Mad Herbalist here. Just running down another popular question we hear often at the booth. You’ve probably seen magnesium in several forms: tablets, powders, bath flakes, sprays sometimes called “magnesium oil,” and increasingly, magnesium creams. But what exactly is magnesium cream? And why would someone choose a cream instead of simply taking […]
What Is Magnesium Cream, and Why Do People Use It? Read More »
Mad Scientist Goods didn’t begin with a business plan. It began with a baby boy whose skin was a mess. Our boy, Alpha Cub, had terribly sensitive, broken skin when he was tiny. Finding things we could actually use to clean and soothe him was difficult, and soap in particular was a real problem. Finally,
Becoming The Mad Herbalist: How Mad Scientist Goods Began Read More »
I have a lot of jars of herbs infusing at the moment. Nine jars of varying sizes, currently crammed into two of the largest-size slow cookers. This is what happens when I get into herbalist mode. Most of these are oils I use in our salves and other herbal products, and since I’ve got so
Oils, Herbs, Chemistry and a missing jar of Comfrey Read More »
Hi Everyone, Mad Herbalist here with another bit of rambling. Sometimes ideas just pop into my head that need to be fleshed out. Today’s brain jam was when I started wondering what other people’s houses are like because surely they don’t look like ours! Mad Scientist Goods is a family business, and this family business
Things our Kids Probably Think are Completely Normal Read More »
Another Year Gone By… I suppose birthdays are meant to make you stop and reflect, but honestly, around here they usually arrive somewhere between “Did anyone move the laundry over?” and “Why is there a goat where a goat should not be?” Still, here we are. Another year of life. Another year of marriage and
Shoe Strings and Wisdom? Read More »
Three super-sized weekend farmers market in a row with seven human kids in tow. Exhaustion setting in hard. We got home only to discover our few-day-old newborn goat kids were missing. Somehow their mothers had managed to lose them out in the wilderness of our property. We found one doe’s singleton fairly quickly asleep in
One More Prayer in the Tall Grass Read More »
Transparency, safety, and the strange little ecosystem inside a jar of cream. One of the oddest things about modern skincare is that consumers are often caught between two competing fears: bad microbes and harmful preservatives/chemicals. The result is a marketplace where people are sometimes encouraged to distrust perfectly reasonable formulations while accidentally placing enormous
Why Proper Ingredient Labelling and Preservation Matter Read More »
Herbalism has never really been about doing everything yourself. It is about knowing what is worth growing, what is worth sourcing, and how to use both well. A good garden teaches that quickly. Some plants grow readily. Some take years before they are worth harvesting. Some will not grow well in a particular place no
Growing What Makes Sense Read More »
Metabolic Safety From the keyboard of the Mad Scientist Back in the Dark Ages, when I was a university student learning organic chemistry, I would do the nerd thing and read beyond the assigned parts of the text. At the end of the chapter on aromatic compounds was a snippet on chronic illnesses among London’s
Mad Scientist Blog #1 Metabolic Safety Read More »
Welcome to Beakers & Botanicals. This is where we share the thinking behind what we make. Some of it starts with a practical question—how to make something gentler, simpler, or more reliable.Some of it starts with curiosity—about how herbs have been used, how the body responds to different substances, or how small formulation choices can
