Next year will mark three decades since Deborah Petersen began making natural soaps out of her home. Since then, her company, Riverdance Soapworks, has become a family business, with her children helping out in her Shelton facility. One of Washington's longest-running soap makers, Petersen offers a range of body products that includes beautiful swirled bars from trippy (Space Dust, Faerie Dust) to regional (The Hoh, Olympia Mist) to mysterious (Frankincense & Myrrh ... and Monkey Farts).
Let’s ask the obvious question: What does Monkey Farts smell like?
Who doesn't want to smell like Monkey Farts? I have to give my son credit for coming up with it. We get more comments about it than any other scent we offer. Several years ago, I told my husband I was tired of talking about Monkey Farts at the market, and I was thinking about discontinuing it. He said that would be a huge mistake, and he was 100% right. We have over 60 different soap scents, and Monkey Farts is always one of our top 10 best-selling scents, no matter what the season. And, of course, customers are curious about the smell. It’s a harmless and pleasant blend of fruity and floral scents.
How can natural soaps help with all our pandemic hand washing?
If you have extraordinarily dry skin (due to hand sanitizers or just body chemistry), you should use a "superfatted" bar soap formulated intentionally to nourish and hydrate dry skin. Our Dry Skin Care soap is superfatted with kukui nut, hemp seed, and evening primrose oils. Each of the ingredients in our formula brings very specific qualities to the final product: luxurious lather, creamy texture, conditioning properties, and a hardness that makes our soaps last much longer than commercially produced soaps.
The personal pampering regimen is also important during times of stress and uncertainty. Just going through the motions of treating yourself well and making consciously healthy choices can have a significant impact on our emotional strength, well-being, and attitude.
Which of your soaps captures the upheaval of 2020?
Our resourcefulness and creative abilities have been tested in some very interesting ways, with sometimes less than desirable results. For example, a few of the colorants we use come from Asia, so we were unable to restock the orange colorant we normally use for our Kauai Ginger soap. The product we substituted unfortunately left us with 150 bars of (not exaggerating here) an eye-stabbing neon orange batch of soap. It smells amazing, and hey, you can probably use it in place of a nightlight in your bathroom!
The popular — and far out — Space Dust bar. (Riverdance Soapworks)
Tell us about the inspiration behind your Space Dust bar.
Our soap-making team was extraordinarily fascinated with the "Great American Eclipse of 2017" and wanted to create a soap celebrating the universe. They started making colorful, tubular columns of soap out of the leftover base from other batches, made small white, star-shaped embeds, and set them aside. And finally, they engineered their universe soap embedded in a black "outer space" soap base. And Space Dust was born. We really struggle to keep it in stock, and it requires a lot of pre-design work, but it's worth it!
