Forget rage rooms. People should be cutting 4-pound loaves of colorful, translucent glycerin soap to relieve stress. Just watching Carla Hayes, owner of Bubbles, slice them into fragrant, candy-colored chunks is soothing. In fact, your cortisol might cool just walking in and taking a deep breath.
Bubbles has been open since January of 1973, when founder Vicky Joyce took inspiration from Berkeley’s original Body Shop and established a distinctly Humboldt iteration of a soap, body care and fragrance business that customized and recycled. Today, half the inventory is still home grown, and the house-infused incense is still made with sticks from the same Bay Area supplier.
Hayes, who bought the store when Joyce retired, started working at Bubbles during her student days at then Humboldt State University studying art. (In fact, all the artwork on the walls is hers.) Five months after Hayes took over, COVID hit, so Bubbles adapted and survived by making sanitizer and collaborating with a local seamstress to make masks.
“We have customers who brag that they’ve been coming in since 1973,” says Hayes. Some of that loyalty is down to Bubbles’ reusing and refilling policy, which offers 25 percent off refills with any container. Any container — drugstore shampoo pumps, Mason jars, condiment squeeze bottles, whatever. “We don’t care,” says Hayes, “we want people to reuse.”
Then there are the custom fragrances — more than 100 to mix and match — for oils, lotions and bath items. Behind the counter is a handwritten registry book bursting with customers’ personalized recipes. One customer in the book has been coming in since childhood. “She has her whole lifetime of fragrances in here,” says Hayes, flipping the pages.
Credit: Photo by Aoife Moloney
If you’re curious about your own custom scent, take the 20 second tour that starts when a staffer hands you the menu of scents. Fragrances start with three fragrances from the list, plus 50 cents for each additional scent. Overwhelmed folks will get all the help they need, in the form of guiding questions and the occasional palate cleansing sniff of coffee beans. “Would you consider yourself a fruity person, a fresh-clean, an earthy, an herbal or a floral?” asks Hayes. From there, they’ll help you narrow down whether you’re drawn to citrus or berries with sniffs of dipped wooden sticks.
Of course, there are house scents, a number of which have cult followings. The No. 1 scent is Rain, a somewhat androgynous scent with a light musk, “the fresh and clean of all fresh and cleans.” A local need take only one whiff to be transported back to a person who wore it or place they smelled it.
The light floral Wild Honeysuckle is another favorite, as is the woodsy and pine-inflected Redwood Moss. Aside from bars of gentle glycerin, all these scents can be added to lotions, bubble baths, shower gels, hydrating creams and incense and shampoos, or you can order them as straight oils in vials or roller bottles.
Credit: Photo by Aoife Moloney
Smell being particularly evocative of memories, the Humboldt-centric scents make fine souvenirs and salves for the North Coast homesick. Douglass Fir is a gentle forest essence, and Lost Coast is a fresh and clean fragrance with some conifer mixed in. Fern Canyon has a balance of greenery with petrichor — the latter being a rainy earth smell that’s otherwise tricky to blend but beloved by those who love a storm.
Locally made candles from Fortuna bring Humboldt vibes to the room, letting you light up varieties like Redwood and Moss.
Give yourself a little time to browse, try a couple lotions, explore a custom fragrance and let the cattails of incense and rainbow cakes of soap tell you whom in your circle they’re for. You’ll be grateful later when the scent takes you back to Humboldt.
Bubbles
1031 H St., Arcata
(707) 822-3450
bubblesarcata.com
Credit: Photo by Aoife Moloney
This article appears in Humboldt Insider Spring/Summer 2026.
