Key brain paste ingredient discontinued, leaving some hide tanners scrambling

Key brain paste ingredient discontinued, leaving some hide tanners scrambling

Some hide tanners scrambling after multi-national company pulled laundry soap bar from shelves

Thumlee Drybones-Foliot's job is to share and teach traditional practices. She’s Dënesųłiné from Yellowknives Dene First Nation, and a land-based educator with the Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning.

These days, she’s having to find a replacement for a key ingredient in a long-standing brain paste recipe she uses to tan hides: Sunlight Pure Soap bar.

“For as long as I have been hide tanning, my great grandmother and all the other hide tanners that I know and have worked with have used a very specific bar of laundry soap,” Drybones-Foliot said.

Drybones-Foliot isn’t alone. The brand is one of the oldest widely marketed branded soaps, popular for over 100 years. The brand changed hands several times over the decades, most recently being acquired by the Henkel Corporation, who discontinued much of the line in Canada. Since then, hide tanners who used it in their brain paste recipes have had to find other solutions.

Drybones-Foliot noticed the bars were no longer available in stores some time ago. Until then, it had been a very affordable and widely accessible product, so she went online to see if she could buy it elsewhere. She was not expecting to see what she did.

“It was kind of interesting to see the whole strife of people trying to get the Sunlight soap. This bar went from $3 to $45, because people had reserved stashes [and were trying to sell] on Amazon and I think eBay," she said.

“Just seeing how desperate people were getting for the soap, how much they were willing to pay for it was really … kind of like a spectacle.”

Melaw Nakehk’o is Dene and Dënesųłıné from Łı́ı́dlı̨ı̨ Kų́ę́ First Nation and a hide tanner, multi-disciplinary artist and a filmmaker. She explained what made this particular bar so special.

“The Sunlight bar soap is a very concentrated soap and it comes in a bar form, not a liquid. In my family we would take the Sunlight bar soap with us when we go out on the land … it’s much easier to transport than liquid,” Nakehk’o said.

“Using that bar soap in my hide tanning practice, it’s so concentrated that it’s really a great agent for making a paste with the brains to help in the softening process.”

She said the soap was a great product to help people who want to reconnect to the practice.

“We are still revitalizing this practice in a lot of communities across the country,” Nakehk’o said. “And the Sunlight soap was really integral to that. This method of teaching has been widely practiced across many communities, so it is a big blow to people who are still learning the process and who have just learned this one way of doing things.”

Nakehk’o said all is not necessarily lost, as the end of Sunlight soap in Canada leaves space for experimentation. She’s taught hide tanning in communities across Canada, and said she’s learned about using a bath solution of Ivory soap and brain instead of a paste, or making a brain paste using soap made from whale oil or bear fat.

“There’s a lot of different recipes that you can figure out through stories,” Nakehk’o said. “A lot of things I’ve learned from listening to elders who used to watch their grandmothers tan hides and how they softened it and what they used, and then doing experiments on my own hide through those stories.”

Drybones-Foliot has tried substituting the Sunlight soap for Fels-Naptha, another soap brand, in her brain paste recipe, and she’s heard Sunlight soap bars were being sold in some stores in Yellowknife. But since the bars are no longer officially sold in Canada, they are imported from other countries, and she’s concerned it’s not the same formulation.

“It’s not our tried, true and tested formula,” Drybones-Foliot said.

As for Drybones-Foliot's search for answers about Sunlight, she went to the source and called Henkel's customer service line. The company offered to file a complaint on her behalf, but that wasn’t what she wanted to hear.

“I wouldn’t let it go, so I asked ‘Well, how could we possibly get it back?’ and [the customer service agent] said if enough people responded, then they would consider bringing products back,” Drybones-Foliot said.

She hopes to encourage more people to reach out to Henkel and encourage them to bring Sunlight Pure Soap Bars back.

CBC reached out to Henkel for details on when the soap was discontinued, and why. The company has not responded to requests for comment.

Julia Parrish is a digital associate producer at CBC North in Yellowknife. You can reach her at julia.parrish@cbc.ca