Salt City Soapworks

Lauren Tyson has walked the Redmond salt mine, which is more research than most of us have done on a bar of soap. Tyson is a former geophysicist, and every soap made in the Salt City Soapworks workshop in Salt Lake City starts with that unrefined Utah salt. "That salt was deposited during the time of the dinosaurs," she told the University of Utah. It sits under bentonite clay, she said, so it has not been exposed to modern pollution.

Salt City Soapworks began in 2021, after Tyson started making soap for the holidays and the bars found a following. To grow it she enrolled in the Master of Business Creation program at the University of Utah's business school, which lets her apply the coursework directly to the company. Corporate gift sets and client appreciation bundles with custom packaging have become a second line of business.

Tyson also keeps bees. She has said beeswax absorbs fat-soluble chemicals like pesticides, so she wants to know where the bees forage. Sometimes that has meant rendering wax late at night in her kitchen.

The company now says more than 90 percent of its beeswax comes from beekeepers in Idaho, 120 miles north of the workshop. The balms, in other words, are made in Salt Lake City from mostly Idaho wax.

Packaging got the same scrutiny. The salt soaps are stamped with their name and key ingredients instead of wearing labels. For the lip balms and body balms, the company built stainless steel filling trays so the balm pours straight into cardboard tubes, because it did not want a plastic-free tube wrapped around a balm that had touched plastic on the way in. The lineup has since grown to a shampoo puck made with Utah honey and a bug-off balm.

The salt still comes from Redmond, about 130 miles south of the workshop, out of a deposit the founder has walked through herself. Most of us just buy the soap.