SOAP & STONE.
Jennifer Cox makes soaps. Some look like small slabs of colorful layered stone; turquoise, agate and amber. She also creates rough, plain-looking soap balls that are like geodes. With their roundish grey-black appearance, being made of sweet smelling glycerin might not be enough to make them appealing, except that they are filled with bright translucent jewels of the same fragrant stuff.
We spoke with her on the phone at her home in Nashville, TN, where her kitchen is her laboratory and workspace every weekend. Sunday, she says, is for soaps.
Jennifer comes from a family of artists. She became an information technology professional, but as we at Reverie Fair know, all women are artists once they find their medium. Jennifer wasn’t looking for her medium, or didn’t know she was. As it turned out, though, she has (at least) two. She found the first with her husband’s help. Browsing in a gift shop together, they were admiring a candle shaped like an ice cream sundae. She told him she thought she could probably make something like that herself. He said it looked too hard; he didn’t think she could do it.
That made it a challenge. Don’t tell me I can’t do something.
rock hound n (1915) 1: a specialist in geology 2: an amateur rock and mineral collector
Jennifer’s grandparents were rock hounds. As a child, Jennifer didn’t much care for the long hikes they took her on to find rocks and minerals. But she remembers sitting by their rock tumbler for hours, waiting to see what it would create from the raw pieces they filled it with. She loved the intense colors, patterns and textures of the different types of stone and gems.
When she told her husband she was thinking about trying to make soaps that looked like gems and minerals, he told her he didn’t think she could do it.