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Carolina Malis

Contributing writer for Style by SCMP, specialising in beauty, wellness and lifestyle


For most of the 2000s, the body wash industry did a convincing job of making bar soap feel like something only your grandfather used. Sleek bottles, foaming textures and a lot of vocabulary around “moisturising complex” pushed the bar quietly to the back of the shelf, where it sat next to nothing in particular. Then, sometime in the past few years, it had a glow-up.
It wasn’t one thing that brought it back into the fray. The slow beauty and sustainability conversation started picking away at single-use plastic packaging and suddenly a paper-wrapped bar looked like the more considered choice. At the same time, the shower started being treated as a ritual rather than a chore, which meant everything in it became an opportunity for intention (and aesthetics).

Which is probably why Chanel’s No 5 bath soap, a creamy bar scented with the floral notes of the iconic fragrance, now sits on bathroom shelves alongside things like candles and curated ceramics. Chloé’s Atelier des Fleurs line translates the maison’s single-note fragrances into logo-engraved bars finished with its signature pleating. And Claus Porto, the Portuguese house that’s been producing elaborately illustrated soaps since 1887, has made a collector’s item of its Deco collection slabs.

But the most interesting part of the bar soap story is what’s changed inside. Traditional bar soaps were alkaline, usually landing somewhere between pH 9 and 10, while your skin’s natural surface sits at a slightly acidic 4.5 to 5.5. “That alkalinity strips away the skin’s natural oils and disrupts the acid mantle, the protective film that keeps moisture in and irritants out, and it can take your skin hours to recover its natural balance afterward,” says John Blount, biochemist and president and CEO of Pure & Gentle. So that tight, dry feeling most people associate with bar soap was really the skin’s acid mantle struggling.
Modern bars are engineered to a different standard. Blount points to three main advances in the best of them: gentler surfactants that lift dirt without over-stripping; barrier-supportive ingredients like ceramides, fatty acids and humectants including glycerine; and what formulators call deposition technology.

“Smart ingredients cause a conditioning film to actually stick to your skin as you rinse, rather than washing straight down the drain,” he says. “Without that, adding moisturising ingredients to a rinse-off product is largely pointless.” Many of the better bars on the market now are what the industry calls syndet (synthetic detergent) bars: think of them as liquid body wash that’s had the water removed and been pressed into a bar, with the same pH balance and the same skin-friendly logic. Dove’s classic Sensitive Skin Beauty Bar is probably the most recognisable example, and it’s lasted this long for exactly the same reasons the format is having a moment now.

“High-quality bar soaps often contain fewer preservatives and unnecessary additives compared to some liquid cleansers,” says Dr Anna Andrienko, dermatologist and aesthetic doctor at Dr Ducu Clinics in London, which means a well-formulated bar can actually be a gentler option for reactive skin than an elaborate body wash full of fragrance and emulsifiers. She also notes that formulation matters more than format. “While traditional soaps were often criticised for being harsh due to their alkaline pH, modern bar soaps are frequently enriched with humectants and emollients such as glycerine, plant oils and butters,” she adds, all of which support the skin barrier, reduce moisture loss and keep skin hydrated after washing.

So how do you tell which bars are doing what they are intended for, versus the ones that are mainly beautiful to look at? Blount says to look for glycerine reasonably high in the ingredient list, and check whether the formula includes ceramides, fatty acids or humectants. “These ingredients help replace what washing takes away,” he says, and in a rinse-off product, where they sit in the formula matters as much as whether they’re there at all. Dr Andrienko’s guidance is similarly practical: “ingredient quality and pH balance remain key considerations”, particularly for dry or sensitive skin types, and she’d add fragrance to that list too, since scenting agents are some of the most common triggers causing irritation in cleansers.

The category has also spread wide enough that the bar you reach for depends entirely on what you’re asking it to do. If the goal is simplicity, Dr Bronner’s Pure-Castile Bar Soaps, made from saponified plant oils and barely anything else, is about as minimal as a cleanser gets. For those dealing with body texture or congestion, a soap like Soft Services’ Buffing Bar takes the format in a more targeted direction, combining physical and chemical exfoliants in a bar that functions closer to a treatment than a basic cleanse. And for something that sits between the functional and the indulgent, L’Occitane’s Shea Butter Extra-Gentle Soap offers a more fragrance-forward approach, without being aggressive and still gentle enough for daily use without a second thought.

Luxury bar soaps operate on a different logic, and at this end of the category, the premium goes into the scent experience as much as anything else. A Chanel No 5 soap, a Jo Malone Pomegranate Noir bar or a Diptyque Eau Rose is a way of wearing a fragrance you love in a format that’s also practical. Brands like Aesop have taken a different approach, treating bars less as fragrance vehicles and more as counter objects, with formulations that are just as popular as anything else in their range. And for those who want the scent experience and the formulation to match, Malin+Goetz’s triple-milled, glycerine-enriched bars are a good middle ground.

None of which means we have to choose between a bar that performs and one that we actually enjoy using, and that’s really what’s shifted: not the format itself, but the scrutiny we’re bringing to it. The same ingredient-reading energy that transformed the skincare aisle has finally arrived in the shower. As Blount puts it, “The real question is always what’s in the formula, not what shape it comes in.”


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With sustainable packaging and modern skin-friendly formulations, high-end beauty houses are transforming soap bars into sought-after items


With sustainable packaging and modern skin-friendly formulations, high-end beauty houses are transforming soap bars into sought-after items.


Luxury bar soap revival: how Chanel, Jo Malone, Diptyque and Aesop elevated everyday cleansers

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}With sustainable packaging and modern skin-friendly formulations, high-end beauty houses are transforming soap bars into sought-after items

With sustainable packaging and modern skin-friendly formulations, high-end beauty houses are transforming soap bars into sought-after items