CUMBERLAND – New Cumberland resident Lizzie Havoc is example A of a person who took what the pandemic handed her and ran with it, shifting her bartending skills mixing ingredients to a new kind of product.
Havoc is a one-woman operation cold-process soap maker. Her company, Beach Witch Bars, creates vegan soaps made with herbs, essential oils and crystals. The idea for the bright and colorful bars, which she says are also “sudsy and gentle,” was born during the COVID shutdown.
Before the pandemic, she and fiancé Justin Dibble were both bartenders/bar managers in Boston. When the pandemic hit and bars shut down for months, they decided they couldn’t sit still, instead writing and editing a web series they called “Bartending in Sweatpants” where they taught people how to make cocktails at home while also raising money for a different restaurant group each week.
In the middle of all of that, Dibble started having violent headaches. He was taken for an MRI where doctors found a very large brain tumor that needed to be removed as soon as possible.
“We started out on a journey filled with an 18-hour brain surgery, recovery and re-learning to do a lot of common things, speaking, walking, as well as getting used to the fact that he is now only able to hear out of one ear due to the size of the tumor,” she said. “When this happened, I knew I was never going to be able to go back to work full-time. The importance of family, healing, and doing something for myself to create a future I could be proud of took over, and Beach Witch Bars was born in my small kitchen in Winthrop, Mass.”
Dibble has now mostly recovered, and the two have made their home back in the Ocean State, where Havoc grew up in South Kingstown, purchasing their first home in Cumberland. She said she continues to bartend part-time, and both of them are trying to make themselves valuable members of the community here in Cumberland.
Havoc said she looks forward to being present with her products at local farmers markets and other events. Like many newer residents to Cumberland, she said, they were looking to have a doable commute to Boston and were priced out of the Boston housing market, but they also want to set down roots in a community they plan to call home for a long time.
Havoc learned the art of soap-making on the fly, ordering her raw materials such as oils, salts, herbs and stones from shops in Rhode Island and Massachusetts.
Products available at beachwitchbars.store include Beach Witch Breast Soap, sold in the shape of breasts, and Love is Love bars for Pride Month.
“All Beach Witch Bars are made with moonlight and magic,” states the site. “What does that mean, exactly? It means that all of our products are made with full moon water. It’s exactly as it sounds: water that’s been left to charge under the light of the full moon, absorbing its energies, its qualities, the magic of the seasons as they change.”
Every soaper is different, said Havoc, choosing different types of oils, from coconut or walnut oil to avocado or olive oil. While her soap has to sit for six weeks to allow liquid to become solid, some take as long as a year.
“Each loaf is different,” she said, explaining how the soap comes out looking like tie-dye with its cruelty-free mica colorant. “It’s a science and an art, for sure.”
Dibble, said Havoc, is now doing quite well. Though he’s deaf in one ear, a cochlear hearing device has proven an “unbelievable” technology in restoring his hearing, she said.
He works as bar manager at a hotel in Boston, she still bartends three nights per week in hopes that she can eventually go full-time with the soap-making business.