Iceberg water isn’t just for drinking

Last spring the tourists didn’t visit Bonavista, NL but the icebergs still did. They have been floating their way down Iceberg Alley longer than there have been people there to marvel in the enormity. And last year as Karen Dewling, cofounder of East Coast Glow, an iceberg-water cosmetics company, made her daily trek up to Cape Bonavista for her own communion with the ice giants that drift by her community every year, she often sat in solitude.

“I remember one iceberg that was tucked in around the cove and I thought about how strange that I was completely alone. Last year had many challenges, but this was kind of special.”

Karen and her husband Roger were in the midst of a rebranding and planning a shift in their strategic direction as a company when the pandemic brought much of the world to a halt last year. The absence of visitors to their region was one issue, but access to the supply chain for their redesigned containers and packaging also vanished.

The diminished tourism season was, as they say, just the tip of the iceberg. Finding solutions to their problems is what Karen does best. In fact, it was a skin problem that Karen and Roger’s infant daughter had, and that the couple was determined to solve, which evolved into the company they continue to nurture and grow today. Karen recalls the day that Roger walked into their house drenched from the waist down, carrying a huge chunk of an iceberg. Roger, a professional chef, was thrilled by the piece of prehistoric ice that he had pulled out of the water on his way home from work.

“He was excited to make drinks for the friends coming to dinner that night. All I saw was soap,” recalls Karen.

When all other treatments for their daughter’s skin condition failed, the soap made with the iceberg water was a last attempt by an exasperated parent to find some relief for her daughter’s chronic eczema. Karen never made soap before but had a book tucked away with the basics of soap making. A few batches of soap later and their infant had skin like a baby.

Karen Dewling with her stores of ingredients; the making of her soap uses no heat and leaves no carbon footprint. Photo by Amy Donovan

Iceberg water is the purest form of water on the earth. When asked about what’s in iceberg water that makes it so special Karen answers, “nothing.” It’s the low mineral content that makes it so precious. “It doesn’t even have a taste,” she says.

Despite its purity, Karen and Roger do distill all of the iceberg water that they harvest themselves. Because icebergs in Bonavista have a season, sometimes as early as March until the end of June, they have their own harvest time. The Dewling family, children now 8 and 11, will often go to the shore to pick up smaller pieces of icebergs that they call “bergy bits.” They have deep freezers full of bergy bits in their studio shop on Church Street in downtown Bonavista—a source of chilling intrigue for their visitors.

As the excitement for their soap bubbled up, iceberg storage became an issue. But the Dewlings were not the only people seeing the value in the icebergs. They started to purchase iceberg water from a local company that was harvesting larger pieces of iceberg and selling it for a variety of purposes, including the local distilling and brewing market.

Karen explains that soap making is basically chemistry: the purer the water, the better the product. Since that first bar of soap, East Coast Glow has blossomed into one of the region’s most unique skin care lines. With attention to their own processing of essential oils and use of foraged ingredients, they often sell out of customer favourites. Their Wild River Mint + Rosemary Iceberg Infused Soap Mousse has become one of their most popular products.

For three days each month Karen steals away to their studio to blend the artisanal liquid soap mixtures she calls a broth. There is one long day where she stirs the herbed infusions for 12 hours. She jokes that she has one very strong arm. “It’s a long day but it is one of my favourite days in the studio,” says Karen. “There is something satisfying about it.” After half a day of muscling the soap paste it goes into storage. She adds that the paste gets better with age, so the longer it sits in storage, the better the end product—which in this case is the mousse soap.

Each product line has its own process. The iceberg water soap cakes are made without heat and leave no carbon footprint in their making.

The greening of the East Coast Glow product line is one of the most important aspects of the company’s values and mission. Last year the company started to transition away from all plastics in their packaging. In the near future and as the supply chain allows, they will be moving to only paper, glass and metal and have plans for refill stations. The experience of the consumer is just as important.

“Handwashing is an everyday thing that we do without thinking, and now more than ever before,” says Karen. “To lather up your hands with something as simple as soap but by making it a little more luxurious is something we all need right now.”