RAISING THE BAR

Despite endless body wash options, the art of luxury soap making hasn't slipped away. Many beauty brands are leaning into the centuries-old product, while elevating it with unique scents and ingredients.

- SOPHIA VILENSKY

To make a bar of soap, you only need two ingredients: an alkaline and a fat. But what’s the fun in keeping things simple?

In recent years, the time-honored craft of soap making has gone through a modern and artistic boom—with brands both big and small taking note.

Most people believe the first bars of soap were made in Babylon around 2800 BCE. “All the ancient cultures, in one form or another, were making a soap product. They did it out of necessity back then, for cleaning clothes and sanitizing,” says Leigh O’Donnell, executive director of the Handcrafted Soap & Cosmetic Guild. Regardless of a few ingredient switch-ups (goodbye tallow and ash, hello skin-soothing and planet-conscious olive oil and aloe), bar soap serves the same general purpose today. In a world of constant technological updates, it’s lasted thousands of years, holding strong through a synthetic detergent takeover in the 1920s and the major body wash craze of the ‘80s and ‘90s.