"My dream was always to live and work by the sea"

ARTISANAL SOAP AND SKINCARE MAKER, SILVANA DE SOISSONS

- KERRYN HARPER-CUSS

Combining work with your passion and a sense of purpose is the ideal for most. Add to this the ability to live where your heart has always desired and you really are getting close to the Holy Grail. In 2020, Silvana de Soissons set about bringing her dream to fruition, moving to a village in Dorset and launching her business Farm Soap Co, handmaking soaps and skincare just minutes from the rugged beauty of Chesil Beach.

'A lot of people say they want to live by the sea, don't they,' says Silvana, 'And I've wanted to make a home on the Jurassic coast for as long as I can remember. It goes back to when I first moved to England at the age of 16. I vividly remember standing on a Dorset beach on a geography field trip with my class and thinking, "I want to live here". And I finally achieved it, aged 56!"

Using seasonal, organic and, wherever possible, local ingredients is fundamental to her ethos, and Dorset seaweed and sea salt feature in several formulations alongside floral and herbal extracts. 'The salt is hand-harvested by Jethro and Joshua at the Dorset Sea Salt Company, and the crystals are full of minerals and nutrients perfect for my bath salts,' says Silvana. 'And I buy my seaweed from Sarah Pinder of Dorset Seaweed. It is the best ingredient, bar none.'

From her cottage and workshop gardens, Silvana harvests pots of rosemary and thyme, baskets of mint, rows of lavender and borders of camomile, evening primrose, lemon verbena, borage and marigold. In autumn and winter, she sources essential oils from warmer climes but says, 'I grow all of my own calendula because if you buy it in from the Middle East it arrives as a packet of pale-yellow dust, whereas my own has rich, glowing ochre and orange petals and I make macerations of it with locally grown oil.