how glyph bar began – our origin story

I guess you could say it all started many years, no, decades ago. You see in a previous chapter of my life I was an archaeologist and in the prologue to that chapter I was a university student studying archaeology. One of the many courses I took was a field school. Now, at this field school we got to use power screens to go through the dirt and… well maybe I should back up a bit…

In archaeology, we often excavate sites to retrieve artifacts to learn as much as we can about the past and the people that lived there. While we do use brushes and trowels on occasion (actually not very often), for the most part we use shovels. When you first learn to excavate with a shovel you don’t go very fast and hand screens are efficient enough. \

Wait, let me back up a bit more… let me explain about the dirt and the screens. Trust me, it will all come together in the end.

As we excavate a site, we are looking for artifacts (and other stuff, but that’s another discussion). The goal is to find them insitu, meaning in place, so we can precisely map and record where they were found. Now even the best archaeologist is going to miss a few artifacts and they will end up with the dirt in a wheelbarrow or bucket. So now what? Well, we sift the dirt through a screen to separate the artifacts from the dirt. As I had mentioned earlier, at first, we go slow, and a hand operated screen works just fine. As one gains experience and skill, and therefore speed, you need to up your sifting game. This is where the power screen comes in. They are essentially screens where the shaking is done by a small gasoline engine – much more efficient.

So, back to my field school. As I pointed out, at this field school we had a few power screens so we could get the feel of them and see how they worked and such. You know, preparing us for the future. As you can imagine, a gasoline engine operating in a hot dusty environment would need the occasional bit of maintenance. I was one of the students in charge of said maintenance. This meant topping up the fuel, checking belts, checking the oil, etc. Undoubtedly, working on the power screens could get one’s hands quite dirty and oily and on one specific day, that is precisely what happened.

Now the problem this day was two-fold. One, we had no soap and water for washing (we were out in a field in the middle of nowhere) and two, I wanted to eat my sandwich. What was I to do? I looked around and found my coffee cup, half filled with leftover cold coffee from the drive in. I thought, well, this will be better than nothing. Not expecting much, you know what they say about oil and water, I poured a bit of the cold coffee on my hands and rubbed them together. Much to my amazement, the grease, dirt, and oil washed away, leaving my hands more than clean enough to enjoy my sandwich.

See, I told you it would all come together. Okay, maybe it needs a bit more…

The coffee worked so well I put two and two together and came up with the idea to make soap out of coffee. I know, there was likely many people out there already doing this, but I had not seen it.

I sat on this gem for a long time. In fact, I even used the idea a couple life chapters later. I was on a two-month camping/driving trip with my then girlfriend (now wife) and low and behold, we had forgot to pack dish soap. I remembered using the coffee on my hands and thought, why not. For the first couple of weeks we would use the leftover coffee and coffee grounds from the meal to wash up the dishes. It worked great! P.S. – free life hack.

Fast forward several more life chapters and I finally put my idea to the test and started making coffee soap. Now as you may have noticed, our coffee soap has no artificial colours or scents. It’s all natural. This gave me another idea, why not make other soaps following the same model. All natural ingredients.

Soap made from simple ingredients for ordinary people.

At glyph bar (aside from the lye, of course) if you can’t put it in your mouth, it’s not going in our soap.

Thus, glyph bar was born.

Now that I’ve bored you with a long tedious story, I invite you to go peruse our soaps. Maybe buy one, or some, or not. Just remember, we are growing our line as we speak. Testing takes time, so please, visit us again soon.

– Brian –