MusK soap, Sweet memories, 100 g

Sweet Memories was presented for years as an unscented soap. The new recipe changes that: it smells of herbs — rosemary, marjoram, sage and thyme, like a little garden where you picked herbs straight into the soup. Beneath the creamy white top rises a sand-coloured hill with a finely grained pattern, and a cluster of dried flowers sits on the edge.

Four herbs, no perfume

The scent is composed exclusively of pure essential oils: rosemary and sage give a green, freshly camphorous base, marjoram rounds it off and thyme adds a warm, spicy note. No fragrance blends. So yes — along with the essential oils come their natural components such as limonene or linalool, which count as allergens; we explain why that is not a flaw in the recipe in our article on allergens in cosmetics. The recipe is vegan: saponified coconut and olive oil, shea butter and sunflower oil — coconut takes care of the lather, the butter of the bar's hardness. The sandy tones of the pattern, meanwhile, are not down to the herbs but to mineral pigments — mica and iron oxides.

Gentle exfoliation and cold-process classics

The grainy pattern of the lower part works as a gentle exfoliant when you wash. The rest is our classic: the cold process, glycerine that forms naturally during saponification and stays in the mass, hand-cutting with a wire and at least 30 days of curing on the shelf. Every bar is therefore a little different — in pattern and in topping. We admit it on purpose.

Between washes, treat your soap to a soap dish that lets the water drain away — a soggy soap is not a better soap. You will find more bars without animal ingredients among our vegan soaps, and we write about what really happens during saponification in our article on saponification.