By Darcel Choy Sunday, June 7 2009

As a child being taught how to make soaps by her grandmother, Leigh Lopez never thought she would turn what she learned into a successful business.

Two years ago Lopez took the plunge and opened her own shop, The Soap Kitchen, located in Tacarigua, where she produces natural handmade soaps and a range of natural creams, organic body butters and aromatherapy bath creations that she promises are formulated with the finest ingredients. According to Lopez, her products are packed with natural anti-oxidants to neutralise free radicals that are a cause of skin deterioration, lines, wrinkles and premature ageing.

In an interview recently at the National Museum’s craft and cultural fair where she was featuring her products, she told Sunday Newsday that she realised a few years ago that she needed a change from the regular eight to four job.

“I just got tired of being behind a desk and decided to put all my energy into making soaps and then my friends and family starting inveigling me to get into business,” she said.

Lopez started getting her business together by sitting down and coming up with new and unique blends for her soaps.

“I am an aromatherapist so I knew how to choose which scents, what would be soothing and invigorating in the soaps. I also knew what essential oils would be beneficial for each type of soap,” she said.

The oils that are used in her soaps include vegetable oils, coconut, olive, sunflower and soybean.

“We also add cocoa butter, mango butter, nutmeg butter and many other exotic butters. The choice of the oils is based on what they want the soaps to do at the end. If we wanted to do a moisturising soap we would use the olive and coconut oils. Shear butter would also be included and then we would just blend all of them together to make the soap,” she explained.

She said that commercial soaps are filled with animal fats while her products are carefully formulated without using any harsh chemicals, detergents, or petroleum based ingredients. Many products also feature organic ingredients such as organic oatmeal, rice flour, and cornmeal.

Lopez offers a wide variety of soaps that have a variety of uses. These include mango, charcoal, rose, bush bath soaps and many others.

She describes the process of production as “a lot of work” but she has four employees to help her along.

“Every inch of the process is done by hand, for example with the mango, we collect the ripe mangoes during the season and then we shred them and dry them in the sun, then we bottle it,” she said.

One of their most popular products is the bush bath soap because it is something people are not used to seeing.

“The bush bath soap is made up of different local bushes like carilli, Christmas bush, hibiscus and a few others. These things clean the skin and take the free radicals away from the body,” she said.

Lopez revealed that nothing is wasted when making these natural soaps. “We use every part, the roots, the stems, the branches everything,” she said.

Lopez, an avid environmentalist, is the mother of two sons, eight and four, who also have a say in what is put into her products.

“My eldest son is always up for something new that I could try. He was the one who suggested to me that I use bananas in the soaps and that has become another popular one,” she said.

She hopes in the future to export her products regionally and internationally and she plans to to introduce two other variants of her Carilli and Bush Bath soaps that are going to come out on the market very soon.

Lopez said the most fun part of what she does is sitting down and creating her recipes. “To see the people I have never met and who have used my products and their response to me is always something positive. People swear by my soaps,” she said.