40 ARKANSAS LIFE www.arkansaslife.com 41MARch 2012 ARKANSAS LIFE

hen Charlene Simon, always a crafter, got the idea one Christmas to give homemade soaps to her friends and family, she didn’t quite know

where to begin. She had met a woman once in a tourist town who knew the trade, but when Simon approached her for help getting started on her own batch, the soapmaker politely declined, explained that she wasn’t taking on new students, and advised Simon to read a couple of books on the subject. Never one to give up, Simon read nearly every book there is on soapmaking and started down the long path that would eventually lead her to Bathhouse Row.

After many botched batches, she reveled in her first success—a plain oatmeal soap—in 1998. By documenting the temperature, humidity, and cooking time of each batch, she weeded out errors and fine-tuned the process. “Soapmaking is kind of like baking,” Simon explains. “It really is the same. You just try something and it either tastes good or it doesn’t. We could both have the same ingredients and make a cake [and they turn out differently].” Once she had a formula down, Simon began treating her new hobby as an art form, enthusiastically inventing new scent combinations and decorative toppings.

For eight years her kitchen doubled as a workshop. Her passion for soap overlapped with her love of baking—literally and figuratively. “The kids would drink their milk and they would say, ‘Mom, I taste lavender in my milk!’ And I would think ‘Oh! Lavender and milk sounds like a great

soap!” Her husband, Justin, urged her to take the soapmaking elsewhere for dinner’s sake—and for safety’s sake. One of the key components in soap is lye, a caustic ingredient that burns the skin but is rendered harmless when used to emulsify fats or oils during the soapmaking process. Simon recounts the history—one intertwined with chemistry—of soap.

“You have to have a fat and an alkali to make soap. Traditionally, soap is made with animal fat … they would get animal fat when they rendered the hog at the end of the year and then they would make soap for the whole village … but now it’s more sophisticated. We use all plant-based fats and our alkali is sodium hydroxide, which is lye,” she says.

When Simon, who had been living in Fort Smith while her husband was stationed there, saw the opportunity to start a life and a business in Hot Springs, she didn’t hesitate to pack up the family and move to the city she’d fallen in love with while vacationing there with other Navy wives. They moved to Hot Springs in March of 2009 and opened a storefront and workshop on Central Avenue two months later.

Bathhouse Soapery and Caldarium seemed like an obvious fit for Hot Springs’s historical Bathhouse Row. She recalls opening the shop with only four bars of each type of soap. A typical batch today makes about eighty bars. “Looking back at photos, I think ‘how did I even make rent that month?’ I only had $200 worth of inventory.” But with help from her husband, a decent Web site, and a lot of word of mouth, Simon’s business

erupted. Stores in Little Rock, Hot Springs, Texas, and Louisiana began carrying the soap, and buyers across the country flocked to her Web site and store on Etsy.com. She laughs and says that “last night we posted our pomegranate soap [on Facebook] and today we had people from Mena drive just to get it based on the picture they saw.”

WBy StAcEy BowERS | photogRAphy By ARShIA KhAN

“SoApBAKER” cREAtES quIRKy SoApS—ANd cupcAKES—oN BAthhouSE Row

S aps on Central

Above: Charlene Simone with a loaf of sweet-potato soap. Left: A bowl of swirled patchouli soap.

42 ARKANSAS LIFE www.arkansaslife.com 43MARch 2012 ARKANSAS LIFE

Food is Simon’s main inspiration when conjuring up new scents. “People can relate to the vanilla and chocolate,” she says. And their mouths water after taking a whiff of something delectably familiar like cookie dough or even beer. Because she finds baking so similar to soapmaking, she prevails effortlessly in the kitchen. In May of 2011, opportunistic Simon saw the chance to make a career out of her second hobby. When the space adjacent to her soap shop became available, she got to work opening Hot Springs’s first and only cupcake shop. With help from an unforgettable name and a host of clever cupcakes, Fat Bottomed Girl’s Cupcakes was an instant success. Simon even mimics several of her soaps, serving up cupcake counterparts to chocolatto, crème brulée, lavender lemon, and other seasonal scents. She even casts cupcake-shaped soaps for those without a literal sweet tooth.

Although she has made a career out of doing what she loves, owning two businesses keeps Simon busier than she ever imagined she would be. Soapmaking is a full-time job that only she can perform. Her husband works at the shop as well, making body scrubs and lotions, and occasionally her son and daughters help with making the products and working the retail side. As occupied as she is, her ambitions never wane. She dreams of teaching her trade to the curious people who constantly prod her for knowledge because she sees herself reflected in them. “When I really wanted to learn about it, no one was there to show me,” she says. “You need someone to hold your hand and say this is this, and this is going to happen, and this is what you want to see or feel or smell.”

She also yearns to open soap and cupcake shop pairings in other tourist towns, including one in her hometown of St. Louis, Missouri. Despite that goal, Simon isn’t sure if she would be willing to leave Arkansas. “We love Hot Springs and I don’t ever see us moving from here,” she says. “We just fell in love with it and we love the customers.” It seems more than a coincidence that Simon fell for a city famous for bathing and that she makes her soaps in the shadows of bathhouses. Even a cynic would have to admit that this story hints at fate.

“the kids would say, ‘MoM, i taste lavender

in My Milk!’ and i would think

‘oh! lavender and Milk sounds like a

great soap!’ ” — chARLENE SIMoN,

hot SpRINgS “SoApBAKER”

Simon’s soap creations are inspired by her cooking, and vice versa. Clockwise from top left: Sponge bath soap, studded with chunks of loofah; rose soap; a bin of trial-size soaps; and Hot Toddy soap. Opposite: Cupckaes from Simon’s adjacent shop, Fat Bottomed Girl’s Cupcakes.