Spring Is In The Air! – As Well As Handcrafted Soap, Artisanal Tourism, & A New Breed of Eco-Cultural Entrepreneurs!

There is an unmistakable scent in the air – from Maine’s wildflowers to Floridian orange blossoms – from California’s freesia’s to British Columbia’s lilies. It is part of a quiet revolution – a ‘soap revolution’ – taking place on bathroom and pantry shelves all across North America – not just of finely made teacup candles and freshly perfumed linens – but of organically made, eco-friendly artisanal soaps – tokens of exotic places and pristine places we recently visited or wished we had.

It used to be that Italy, France, and Spain were the arbiters of soap fashion and luxury (i.e. Savon de Marseille and Castile Soap) – going back centuries to the Middle Ages and beyond. But in the last twenty years, America has come into its own – not only in handcrafting soaps as works of art – but in promoting ‘natural’ soap-making as a small- scale, naturally-sustainable economic livelihood for individual entrepreneurs and as a cultural heritage destination for tourists attracted by the natural resources and artisanal heritage of uniquely distinctive communities and regions.

In other words, much like the mid-19th century Hudson River School of landscape painters, today’s 21st century American artisanal soapmakers now take their inspiration from the natural environment around them and in turn are creating new organic soaps that expand upon the historic and cultural treasures of their locale. Rejecting commercial soap products and many of its synthetic additives and chemicals, this new breed of eco-conscious soapmakers is leading the way to a healthier lifestyle of skin care. Indeed it was Sigmund Freud who once said “Soap is the yardstick of civilization.”

One outstanding example of this can be found right in my home state of New Jersey in a collection of handcrafted soaps based on the legendary creature of the New Jersey Pinelands – an 18th century mythical beast called the ‘Jersey Devil’. Christine Mecca’s online store introduction says it all: (We at the ‘Jersey Devil Soapworks’) “have taken the spirit of the New Jersey Pine Barrens, its pitch pines, cedar streams and sugar sand roads and combined it with all natural ingredients and fragrances to produce fine, hand-made artisan soaps. We have taken our inspiration from one of the Pine Barrens most popular legends and have tried to infuse that into every bar of soap we make.”

But eco-conscious soapmaking is more than just a means to improving our own natural beauty – natural handcrafted soap is now being used to save the very ecosystems from whence the soap was made. Uniquely marketed in 100% recycled paper boxes, BirdProject Soap, created by Christine ‘Tippy’ Tippens of New Orleans is an exemplary example of how an artisanal soapmaker can make a difference in the recovery and restoration of a region’s coastline – in this case the Louisiana coastline. Spurred on by the BP Oil Spill disaster and the disastrous effects on brown pelicans and sea turtles, this eco-conscious entrepreneur is using her handcrafted soap as a means to raising money to fund both the environmental cleanup and animal rescue efforts along the Gulf Coast shoreline. Within each of her black, bird-shaped handmade glycerin soaps is a white ceramic bird made of Louisiana clay as a ‘reminder’ of the region’s precious natural and cultural resources.

Yet there is something more to this ‘reminder’ that is intrinsic to both the popularity of this ‘soap revolution’ and today’s ‘Handcrafted Soapmakers Guild’, organized originally in Ohio in 1998. Just as artisanal soapmaker, Frank Asquith, founder of Yosemite Soap Works, is bringing the spirited waterfalls and the high spring air of the giant sequoias of the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California into his handmade olive oil soaps – and – Susan Houlihan, founder of Alpenglow Skin Care in Alaska, is now bringing the wild softness of Alaskan snow and berries of the Kenai Mountains into her handmade goat milk soaps – today’s North American eco-conscious soapmakers everywhere are distilling a bit of luxuriant sensory utopia right into their naturally made soap creations. They are inventing and re-inventing organically made soaps dedicated to an American Shangri-La – – an eco-American Shangri-La- – that gives people not only a greater sense of self, a brighter outlook on life, and a more youthful appearance – but a heightened awareness of environmental harmony. Yes, indeed, Sigmund Freud – today’s handcrafted eco-friendly soap is now the new yardstick of civilization!