CG Pure Wash

Body butter season starts about now.

Thicker than a lotion because there's no water in it — just butters and oils, so nothing evaporates off and takes moisture with it.

Best on damp skin straight out of the shower. A little goes further than you think, and if it feels like too much, you've used too much.

Full ingredient list on the page.

Maker spotlight: Prairie Made Co.

Manitoba wildflower honey, unpasteurized, infused with lemon zest. Three ingredients on the label and one of them is zest.

They also make jewellery — beach glass pendants and gemstone earrings — which is an unusual combination for one maker and somehow works.

The honey is the thing people come back for. Good on toast, better stirred into tea when the weather turns.

Third in our weekly maker series.

In store at 2082 Ness Ave.

The light's changed. You can feel it in the mornings now.

Sea buckthorn is one of the few oils that genuinely earns its reputation — high in omega fatty acids, and the orange colour is carotenoids rather than dye.

A few drops at night, pressed in rather than rubbed. It goes further than you'd expect.

This is the point in the year when skin starts asking for more, and the earlier you adjust the less you notice the change at all.

African black soap is one of the few things in skincare with a genuine history rather than a marketing one.

Traditionally made in West Africa from plantain skin ash, cocoa pod ash, and shea — the ash is what gives it the colour and the mild grit.

Ours is a bar, not a paste, so it behaves like normal soap in a normal shower. Good for skin that runs oily or congested.

Full ingredient list on the page.

We started this because of sensitive skin.

Years of irritation, harsh ingredients, and reading labels that didn't really say anything. So we started making things we could actually use.

That turned into a shop on Ness Avenue with thirty-odd other Canadian makers in it.

No pivot, no business plan. Just soap that didn't make things worse.

Commercial soap makers remove the glycerin.

It's the most valuable part of the reaction, and it gets sold on to the skincare industry — sometimes back to you, in a moisturizer.

We leave ours in the bar. It was never ours to take out.

That's most of the reason a handmade bar doesn't leave your skin tight, and most of the reason it's softer and won't last as long as a supermarket bar. Fair trade, we think.

Open until 3 today.

The third Friday of September is Military Family Appreciation Day in Canada.

It's a day for the people who don't wear the uniform. The ones who hold things together at home during a posting. Who learn a new city, a new school, a new routine, and do it again a few years later. Who keep the phone close and answer on the first ring.

I'm one of them. My son serves in the Canadian Air Force, and I've learned what that quiet, ordinary kind of steadiness costs a family.

To every military family in Winnipeg and across the country — today is for you.