Four years ago, after a friend complained about there not being enough unicorn merchandise in the world, Amanda Nelson tossed a bottle of handmade perfume into her Etsy store and named the spearmint-meets-cotton candy scent Unicorn Farts as a joke.

An irreverent pop culture news site spotted it and wrote it up. “Star Trek”‘s George Takei spotted that and gave it a boost on social media.

Nelson logged 400 orders of Unicorn Farts perfume every day for a week straight.

“(The situation) was just a hot, pajama-wearing mess,” said Nelson, 34. “You can’t really complain about it, but it is the pit in the crafters’ stomach that only crafters who make things can understand. Complete panic. Because you’re the one who has to get it out the door.”

She’s been no one-trick unicorn. Nelson’s Long Winter Soap Co. of Damariscotta makes lip balm, bath soaks, lotions and perfumes in scents including Yeti Breath, Cat Lady and Bloody Lumberjack.

Orders are brisk, so brisk that boyfriend Lucas McNelly recently left his job to join her in the work full time.

They can keep up, barely, Nelson joked. “Until Christmas hits and I’m just standing in the corner crying to myself.”

Nelson grew up in New York and settled in Maine after graduating from the University of Maine with an English degree in 2004. 

“I had a real estate license. I was a high school substitute teacher. I worked at a day care,” she said. “English major kind of stuff.”

A few years later, when her youngest daughter, Lucy, was born, the little redhead’s sensitive skin broke out in contact dermatitis in reaction to nearly every soap and lotion Nelson used, “like she had cradle cap but all over her entire body.”

That started her experimenting, making homemade unscented soap. She launched the business from there in 2007. 

The quirky names come about in a variety of ways. Often, Nelson said, she thinks of her demographic first.  

“Cat ladies, what do they like? Cat mint,” she said. Nelson added a little black tea fragrance to that.

A Canadian tack company asked her to invent something named Pony Breath. 

Ponies like apples and sugar cubes. Done.

Gretel, White Witch and Dark Witch emerged around a fairy tale theme. Yeti Breath came out of a brainstorming session with a West Coast artist friend.

“Figuring what a yeti would smell like probably is pretty disgusting,” Nelson said.

So she took liberties. Its description online: “Yetis eat yellow snow. So this tastes like a lemon coconut snow cone! Heck yeah, lemon snow cones.”

For Unicorn Farts, she figured that should smell fresh, like toothpaste and cotton candy. Maybe like something from the 1980s. 

“I’m not really a unicorn, glitter, pastel, rainbow kind of person. It was really just making fun of people,” Nelson said. “I listed it on Etsy just to have a link to send (her friend). Before she could look at it, it sold. To Paris.”

In 2013, Long Winter Soap Co. moved off Etsy and onto its own website. Today, most sales are within the U.S., most to California. Unicorn Farts lip balm is the company’s best seller, by a lot.

“I’m surprised daily,” Nelson said. “I’m surprised by what people really respond to. Drunk Santa, I thought I was going to get angry letters from moms. I might still.”

For now, the company’s base of operations is the basement in their country home, where she has a wall and a half of brown bottles filled with oils and fragrances to experiment with and concoct. Finished product spills over into the living room and kitchen. 

Nelson would like to move out of the house and hire staff, eventually, once the company grows a bit more. 

“We’re at the ‘who can volunteer to come label things’ stage and ‘can we pay them in beer?'” joked McNelly, 36.

For now, it’s the two of them and lots and lots of Unicorn Farts.

“We get to watch ‘Murder, She Wrote’ on Netflix while we work, drinking wine — there are worse gigs,” he said. 

Weird, Wicked Weird is a monthly feature on the strange, unexplained and intriguing in Maine. Send ideas, photos and unicorn kisses to kskelton@sunjournal.com.

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