Essence of flora and fauna Artisanal soap inspired by and infused with Manitoba countryside The Creators
By: AV Kitching Posted: 3:00 AM CDT Saturday, Apr. 20, 2024

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This article was published 20/04/2024 (854 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Leiah Bauer has something of a mythical sorceress about her as she goes about her day measuring oils, extracting flower pigments and milking goats on her farm in the forests of southeastern Manitoba.

On her homestead near Richer where she raises her brood of caprines — Nigerian Dwarf, Alpine, Saanen and Toggenburger breeds — Bauer makes blocks of artisanal soap inspired by the nature surrounding her property.

In a steamy shower, Bauer’s Apothecandy soaps release their heady natural scents — juniper, litsia and birch; elder, pine and eucalyptus. Coloured with natural dyes, each batch is crafted with the seasons in mind and some have elaborate scenes carved into them.

“The soap I make is goat’s milk soap that is cold-processed. I use different oils and butters that are very good for your skin. I create scenes based on the seasons: I have a full-moon soap I make during the full moon. I have one that looks like wood grain and one that looks like snowfall. They change throughout the year,” Bauer says.

Her goal is to capture the esthetics, smells and memories of things associated with nature.

“Scent is connected to memory very strongly and I try to capture those moments and smells for people to have this little handful of nature every day. This daily ritual: we all clean our bodies, we all wash our hands… to be able to combine that with something beautiful, something that evokes emotion, makes you feel a certain way or remember something… that is my goal, to bring joy in many ways to different people,” she says.

The herbalist and self-described “goat whisperer” milks daily, rotating her dairy goats to ensure she’s not taking too much at once. Milking stops in the winter; pregnant goats do not get milked at all.

“It is very much a partnership between myself and the goats,” she explains.

The raw fresh milk is immediately frozen, then taken out when Bauer is ready to start making soap. First she weighs out the oils and butters she needs before heating them up to combine. She then cools them to about 400 F.

At this point she starts adding lye to her frozen milk in stages until the milk is melted and the lye is mixed in.

When the temperatures of both the oil-butter and the milk-lye mixtures are the same, Bauer strains the latter into the former before carefully blending until the mixture takes on the thickness of heavy cream.

When she is satisfied with the thickness, she portions it into batches, before mixing botanicals for colour and essential oils.

She has to work quickly to create her designs; due to thermal reactions the liquid will continue to thicken when everything is combined.

The mixture is then poured into moulds to set. The blocks are cured from four to six weeks before the soaps are ready for use.

“It’s a combination of science and magic and art and nature — all of those things,” Bauer says. “There is a lot of trial and error that goes into figuring out how to make these useful and beautiful things.”

Soaps are coloured with dyes extracted from flower pigments and boosted with ethically sourced and eco-certified essential oils, which she buys from a Canadian supplier.

“I try to grow as many botanicals as I can,” she says. “Like calendula, chamomile, indigo and madder root, for example. I also sustainably harvest some botanicals from the forest like balsam poplar buds, yarrow, nettle, white willow bark and birch sap.”

The resulting bars seem too precious to use but Bauer is not one to keep things for ‘best.’

“Something I hear a lot is ‘it’s too pretty to use, it should sit on my shelf and look nice,’ but this is very good soap. I have made it to be used. We should use beautiful things, we should light the good candles, use the good soap, wear the pretty dress. Instead of letting them all sit in the closet. I believe in using beautiful things,” she says.

av.kitching@freepress.mb.ca