Gift set – Herbal soaps

Five soaps from one family: each has a pale cream top that spills over a coloured base like a cap — mustard, pink, cinnamon brown, purple and grey-green — with a sprinkling of dried flowers or herbs along the edge. The herbal soap gift set is handmade by the cold process, and every soap has cured for at least 30 days.

Why are the herbs on top rather than inside?

Because chemistry does not read marketing copy: most herbs darken over time in the alkaline soap mass, and a nice green ends up brown. That is why we sprinkle them on the surface, where they keep both their colour and their shape — on the purple soap you can see whole dried lavender flowers, our most common botanical ingredient of all. We source our herbs from Slovakia or the Czech Republic.

The scents come exclusively from essential oils — and like every natural essential oil, these naturally contain fragrance allergens too. It is not a flaw in the recipe, just an honest label; we go into it in detail in our article on allergens in cosmetics.

The set will please anyone who keeps herbs in a pot, on the windowsill and in the garden — and, come to think of it, anyone who so far only drinks them in tea. Five soaps with the same build and different insides are also easy to share out: one for the bathroom, one for the kitchen sink, the rest according to household diplomacy.

We cut the soaps with a wire, so the line between the cream top and the coloured base falls somewhere different on every bar — five soaps, five small originals. The dried topping gradually washes away with use — that is not a fault with the bar, just the natural behaviour of flowers on soap. Treat the soaps to a soap dish that drains, so the topping and the pattern last as long as possible, and you will find more bundles among our gift sets.

To lather is human. Smelling of herbs is human too.