THE LITTLE PRINCE

A tiny silhouette of a boy with a fox, a yellow sun and a rolling green meadow in the bottom layer — a picture from a book that needs no introduction, poured into a peach-coloured soap. The Little Prince is a design soap with a gentle citrus-floral scent: the warmth of coriander, the spark of grapefruit, sunny litsea cubeba and the calm of lavender. A piece of a fairy tale that fits in your palm.

How does a sunset get into a design soap?

In layers. The peach sky, the yellow circle of the sun, the rolling meadow — we pour each colour separately and then cut the soaps by hand with a wire, so no two planets have the same sunset. The silhouette of the boy with the fox is pressed into the soap as a subtle relief you can feel in your hand.

At work in the recipe is coconut oil with shea butter, topped up with olive and sunflower oil: coconut gives the lather volume and the soap hardness, shea butter adds firmness and leaves skin supple, olive brings a gentler character — skin doesn't feel tight after washing. The scent comes exclusively from essential oils — no fragrance blend, just coriander, grapefruit, litsea cubeba and lavender in a dose that even a children's bath can handle.

Even a fairy-tale piece is an honest soap made by the cold process: palm-oil-free, with glycerine that forms right in the soap during saponification, and with at least 30 days of curing on the shelf while the colours settle and the soap hardens.

We have also blended the same composition as The Little Prince essential oil blend — in case you want the room to smell like a little planet even before you go and wash.

In its paper box it makes a gift for readers aged six to a hundred. Between washes, give it a soap dish that lets the water drain away — soggy soap is not better soap. And if you are curious how many manual steps fit into a single soap, we write about it plainly in our article on why handmade soap costs more.