Ashley Morin strapped on her goggles, rolled up her rubber gloves and got to work this year making and selling handmade soaps and bath bombs to sell through her small business, Morin Soaps.
Morin says she was introduced to soaps when she was a teenager through Uptown business, Sudsmuffin.
Sudsmuffin sold handmade soaps, lotions, and perfumes and was operated by her mother’s high school friend Ivan McCullough and his wife Johanne from 1996 to 2011.
“I would watch from a distance when he would be making a batch of soap, Ivan would be doing his own version or variations of things that he liked to do,” she said. “Ivan would buy silicone bundt cake molds and pour in a chocolate fragrance mixed with coffee, then he would cut them in slices and once they were cured he would make up a little bit of white soap to mimic the drizzle of what’s on a coffee cake.”
She began making her own soaps in 2018, first as a hobby and then out of a desire to make products that worked well with her own dry skin and her son’s sensitive skin.
Many of her soaps are scented and shaped like desserts, from chocolate macarons to cinnamon donuts, that look so real you think you could eat them at a glance.
“It’s fun to finally do it because I’d been so afraid to touch the lye – you can really hurt yourself because there’s a bit of a dangerousness to making the soap too,” she said.
Soap is made by mixing lye, also known as sodium hydroxide, with water, then mixed with fatty oils, colours and scents in an immersion blender and set in a mold to go through the saponification (the turning into soap) process.
“I find it therapeutic to do all the different soap designs – you’re not just doing like one solid colour and you get to divide up the batters and you’re doing a bunch of intricate swirls,” she said.
As word-of-mouth spread and demand grew Morin decided to turn her hobby into a small business, which opened this January.
Morin plans to add more products to her line alongside the soaps and bath bombs, saying she found people are much more open to purchasing locally made products during the pandemic.
“I take inspiration and pay homage to [Ivan and Johanne] because they kind of introduced me to it and so that’s that why I do all the cutesy stuff because they did all of that as well – its kind of in memory to them,” she said.
This story was originally published on Huddle.Today – an Acadia Broadcasting Limited content partner.