Made in Missouri

Big Fizzy Bath Balls

Updated at October 04, 2006 21:10

St. Louis Firm Creates Love in the Tub By Dawn Klingensmith

What gift besides roses brings pleasure to noses?

Fizzy bath balls from Love in the Tub will surround your sweetheart with mood-enhancing aromas, including rose petal — the company’s best-selling fragrance — jasmine, honeysuckle, and orange blossom. Simply draw your Valentine a bath and drop an effervescent bath ball under the stream of running water for a spa-like pampering experience. The ball dissolves to release almondoil moisturizers and fragrances that leave skin feeling silky and smelling delicious, according to the product’s St. Louis creators.

Love in the Tub bath balls come in two varieties: Tub Fizzers and Tub Bubblers. A fizzer effervesces in bath water “like a big Alka-Seltzer,” says Lori Alstat, director of marketing for the online retailer. A bubbler effervesces in the same manner but offers a sensory bonus: a tub full of cushiony suds.

Both types of bath balls are available in the company’s extensive Love Line of fragrances, featuring twenty scents, and in four aromatherapy blends formulated to increase vitality, induce tranquility, or heighten feelings of harmony and romance.

Romance aromatherapy bath balls combine rose, jasmine, and neroli essential oils, which synergistically escalate affection and boost confidence, Lori says.

Buyers may mix and match bath balls for a quantity discount ($14.25 for three, $26 for six, or $47 for twelve).

Valentine’s Day is Love in the Tub’s busiest season of the year, which is appropriate, as the business is strictly a labor of love. The company’s parent company, Nomax Inc. of St. Louis, manufactures drugs and medical devices. Nutritional supplements and antacids that effervesce in water are two of their principal products.

Effervescent tablets have been on the market for a long time as denture cleaners and antacids. The owner of Nomax, a chemist by the name of Charles Voellinger, was puzzled that no one had thought of a merrier, non-medicinal application for the tablets’ fizzproducing reaction with water. It dawned on Charles that the tablets could be plopped into the bathtub for some good, clean fun.

Today, fizzy bath balls abound, but when Nomax spun off Love in the Tub in 1999, few other manufacturers were making them. The ones that were available were each “the size of a large gum ball,” Lori says, so Love in the Tub distinguished its product from the getgo by turning out effervescent spheres the size of baseballs.

“We had all the ingredients already,” Lori says. “All we needed was a mold to form the balls and some packaging to put them in.”

Lori believes Love in the Tub’s bath balls are still among the largest ones on the market.

Love in the Tub’s offerings have expanded to include moisturizer- infused body washes and multi-tasking aromatherapy fragrance spritzers that function as perfume, room fresheners, or linen sprays.

Bath and body gift sets also are available. For Valentine’s Day, Lori recommends the Romance Aromatherapy Experience Gift Set ($27), which comes with a Tub Bubbler, a Tub Fizzer, body wash (which doubles as bubble bath), Spritzer, and a body puff.

Love in the Tub also offers bath balls with personalized, customprinted packaging for wedding favors and other events. The minimum order for custom imprints is one hundred bath balls.

For more information, call 1-877-793-LOVE or visit www.loveinthetub.com.

February 2006

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