GREEN TREASURE

GREEN TREASURE is built on hemp oil — an ingredient the recipe is made for, not one it is topped up with. Alongside it come a gentle scrub of natural pumice and a fresh green scent of lime, Siberian fir and marjoram from pure essential oils. Vegan soap, handmade by the cold process, with a creamy lather for hands and the whole body.

We did nothing to add the mustard-green shade — there is no colourant in the ingredients; the recipe gets its colour from its own raw materials, so it can vary subtly from batch to batch. We say so out loud. It is a natural part of its character, not a flaw.

What does pumice do in soap?

A gentle scrub. Pumice is crushed volcanic rock — tiny particles that mechanically cleanse the skin as you wash and then simply rinse away with the water. You feel them more than you see them. And that is exactly how much to expect from it: if an ingredient has no job we can name, it simply is not in the soap.

The base is coconut and olive oil with shea butter and hemp oil: coconut takes care of lather and hardness, olive gives the soap a gentler character, shea butter leaves skin supple and hemp oil rounds out the fatty-acid profile of the recipe. The recipe is deliberately superfatted — some of the oils stay unsaponified so that the soap does not wash away more than it needs to; how such a figure is calculated is set out in our article on superfatting soap. The glycerine that forms naturally during saponification stays in the mass. We wire-cut every block and leave the bars to cure on the shelf for at least 30 days. In Prievidza, palm-oil-free.

The scent is one of the quieter ones: lime comes in first, fir and marjoram draw it towards green — and since we build the scent composition with an eye to how it will smell in a month, not how it smells in the bowl, it keeps its character on the shelf too. Between washes, let the soap dry out on a soap dish that lets water drain away. You will find more bars that gently cleanse the skin as you wash among our cleansing and exfoliating soaps.