Born and raised in South Africa, Susara Marcotte started her working life as a receptionist, working her way up to Salary Survey Analyst intern, a world away from the apothecary bench she tends today. She met her husband online, as pen pals; he came to visit her, they fell in love, and married in South Africa, before deciding to make Canada their home.

 

At 29, Susara turned her life upside down and went back to school, with her sights set on veterinary school. Then her son was born, and everything changed. Living with chronic pain that became intolerable after his birth, and navigating his ADHD diagnosis, she started searching for answers in an unexpected place: the plant world.

 

What began as a mother's research became a calling. Entirely self-taught, Susara spent years studying herbal traditions, plant chemistry, and formulation, testing everything at her own workbench before it ever reached a customer's hands.

 

Her scientific grounding runs deep: she entered the master's program in Biology at Laurentian University in Sudbury, and though her health kept her from finishing the degree, she went on to co-author a peer-reviewed paper on wetland plant ecology, published in the journal Botany (2018).  

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To keep herself from going crazy at home, with a concussion injury adding to her chronic pain, she started making cold process soaps.  What began as a ingredient saving initiative, turned into a passion.  Learning started all over for her as she delved into the different oils, additives and botanicals that would make her soaps more than just soap.  This is where she realized that many claims made by soap makers are falce.  

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Susara started teaching monthly cold process soap workshop.  Using only herbs that retain their benefits after the extreme temperatures that cold process soap goes through.

 

Today, from her home in Capreol, Ontario, she handcrafts Bona Res Canada's line of herbal balms, botanical soaps, and teas.  She teaches monthly cold-process soap workshops and is the author of Lather & Learn, her illustrated guide to botanical soap making, and Thyme to Create, the first book in the Little Earth Keepers children's series.