I make handcrafted artisanal soaps, bath & body products using the best quality ingredients I can find - mostly stuff you can eat.
My soap bars are created in the time-honored cold-process tradition -- cooked on a stove-top and stirred by hand. All of the products are made in small batches with great care, ensuring freshness, quality and the highest standards.
My soap bars are all vegetable-based, utilizing food-grade olive oil, organic coconut oil, sustainably harvested palm oil, plus luxurious nourishing organic shea butter. All of the formulations are super-fatted, meaning they have higher levels of unsaponified oils, creating a glycerin-rich, highly moisturizing bar for all skin types and sensitivites. The clouds of rich, luxurious lather are soothing and healthy for your skin.
Colors and textures are created from organic herbs, spices, grains, clays, minerals and sea vegetables. No synthetic dyes, preservatives, fixatives, germicides or extra fillers are ever added. The unique scents are made primarily with pure botanical essential oils, while a few of them contain the highest quality fragrance oils.
My passion is creating new scents and products which celebrate the changing seasons.
When winter finally starts to melt, we are aching for signs of spring. Starting the day with a shower full of lilac blossoms or sweet pea petals can make all the difference. A few moments of warm, flowery anticipation of what's to come gives us that extra boost of hope, igniting happy memories and sparking imaginations. And as temperatures start to heat up, there is nothing better to cool the summer sizzle than a fresh, tingly bar of soap packed with icy mint, calming cucumber, creamy yogurt, maybe a squeeze of lemon. As the seasons slowly turn, pumpkins, cranberries, tart apples, and warm cinnamon spices add coziness and cheer to a drizzly autumn. Winter holiday season may be the most fun of them all, with a sleigh full of playful scents and flavors, and gift ideas galore.
The seasonal scents and products are made in limited quantity, available for just a few short months. There is always something new at Soapworks Studio -- so check back often, sign up for the newsletters, or subscribe to the blog.
How did you get started in this whole soap making thing anyway?
I’ve been a soap junkie -- ahem, connoisseur -- for as long as I can remember. I’ve been an independent thinkerfor even longer than that. Oh I tried those things called “jobs” but I never really liked them and was always day dreaming a way to work from home for myself.
When my last job (catering! for Nordstrom of all places!) was eliminated and I had a little time on my hands (right?) I ditched the daytime tv and pity parties to dive head first into my new thing. I wasn’t sure what it was, but after a week or so of mulling it over fervently, I woke up one morning with a light bulb over my head and a determination in my solar plexus that I had never felt before. I’d make soap!
I figured I loved to cook and was a master of blending spices and flavors. And I loved to garden too, having a deep fondness for herbs and living green things. Plus I’d already dabbled in a bunch of DIY beauty concoctions so really, how hard could this soap making thing be, right?
I got every book I could find out of the library on making soap - all 3 of them. Dudes I know this is hard to believe but there was only a whisper of an internet then - and no I didn’t need to take my horse and buggy to get there. I ran around town searching for that list of strange ingredients and used cookware from Goodwill. A few days later I gloved up and tried making my first-ever batch of soap. The next day I did more. And then I waited. And waited. Soap takes 4 weeks to cure!
Impatient as I am, I took out one of those bars after only two weeks and started sudsing in the shower anyway. It smelled sooooo good, and felt as good as anything else I’ve ever used before. Sigh, totally smitten. So I did what any sane person would do - I pulled a business name out of thin air, ran out to buy my biz license, open bank accounts. This was October and I had no time to waste if I wanted to get in on the holiday bandwagon.
I gave samples to everyone I knew while making more and more tiny batches daily, experimenting with scents and colors and hoping not to screw it up. Then I sent letters to everyone I knew - my first newsletter - and lo and behold, I got a few orders for Christmas gifts.
The rest, as they say, is history. Quite a lot of history, in fact. It’s been 26 years now and I’ve experimented with almost every ingredient and type of bath or body product that was ever dreamed up. With the overwhelming universe of knowledge on the web now, I’ve been able to feed my passion and curiosity about all things skin, health and beauty, taking it back to my kitchen and to my customers with the very best small-batch products I can possibly create.
Year by year the complexities of this spinning world grow more bewildering and so each year we need all the more to seek peace and comfort in the joyful simplicities."
- Woman's Home Companion, December 1935