DEPARTMENTS

Finding Keepers

Story and photography by Julie Dean

In anticipation of the sweet aromas of spring, bring freshness to your home with handmade soaps and lotions produced by Southwestern artisans. These soaps’ fragrances include classic New Mexican inspirations like juniper, sage, piñon, and cedar. Ingredients bring to mind the essence of the Southwest: beeswax, goat’s milk, honey, mica, fir needle, and sage leaf. Other ingredients evoke the exotic, such as ultramarine blue, French pink argiletz clay, and annatto seed. All of the soaps are gentle and consider our dry desert air.

These soaps do more than just clean; they have a presence all their own. TAS Touch soaps look like they were mined from a precious stone quarry—polished on all sides but one, which bears the company name in metallic writing. The presentation—that of a small treasure—accurately implies what’s inside.

Milk and Honey Soap makes soaps and lotions cast into beautiful palm-sized icons. These include bees on honeycomb, sleeping cats, sunflowers, swirls, and the all-important goat from which the milk for the soap and lotion is derived. The rich lotion bars soothe and moisturize your hands even as you pick them up.

Clear Light, The Cedar Company has been producing soaps and lotions in Placitas, New Mexico, for more than 30 years. The business uses the native green cedar needles for their calming and balancing properties, just as the Hopi and Navajo have traditionally done. Harvesting needles leaves the native trees healthy, and the aroma is pure New Mexico. The line includes shampoo, lotion, body wash, and bar soap.

Ultimately, these soaps and lotions offer something amazing. You can kiss winter goodbye and transport yourself to a watermelon patch, you can add a bit of color and beauty to your kitchen, bath, or studio, you can heal, balance, and calm yourself, you can support local farmers and artisans, and, of course, you can simply wash your hands.

Clear Light, The Cedar Company, Cedar Mountain soaps, 6 oz. and Cedar Mountain Moisture Lotion, 8 oz. Find Clear Light products at your local natural grocery in Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and Taos and at The Floating World at Ten Thousand Waves, 3451 Hyde Park Road, Santa Fe, NM, 505/982-9304, tenthousandwaves.com. Clear Light, The Cedar Company P.O. Box 551, Placitas, NM 87043, 505/867-2381, clcedar.com.