You can’t go far in the South of France without sauntering into a little shop, more often than not furnished with light wooden dressers, artfully displaying rows upon rows of handcrafted artisanal soaps. Blocks and blocks of delicious pastel shades, each with their own mouthwatering scents. Endless sorbets of mimosa, fig, lavender and peach, so tantalising I could not help but collect every possible flavour I laid my hands upon during my recent trip. Once home, I stacked these treasures in a dish in my bathroom, and gifted a few to loved ones, a lasting memory of my lazy days in Provence, which seasons later still delight my senses. And, each time I dip into my delicious stockpile, I wonder if we are indeed missing a trick.
Soap: a substance which when mixed with water, is used for washing and cleaning. It’s produced from natural oils coupled with a strong alkali component, and made all the more beautiful by the addition of colour and perfume. The humble bar of soap can be traced back more than 500 years, and in ancient times was used for the cleaning of objects such as utensils, rather than the cleaning of bodies. France is deep rooted in the history of soap, with it thought that soap makers in Marseille existed back in the ninth century, continuing to this day to produce the well known ‘Savon de Marseille’. It wasn’t until the turn of the 18th century that the French pioneered modern soap making, leading eventually to it becoming more of a commodity for bathing. And yet, the popularity of this beautiful product seems to have diminished somewhat, with Savon de Marseille claiming that while in the 1880s the region was home to nearly one hundred soap works, now there are less than five following this tradition.
Take a moment to think about our current day preferences for washing our bodies, and I believe one-use plastic bottles of gels and foams now fill our shopping baskets. Granted, no-one wants to share a bar of grimy soap sloshing around the sink of a communal public toilet. But, when did the traditional bar of soap become a less attractive option in our own private bathrooms? I’d suggest a squirt of generic shower gel in all its neon glory, with its unsustainable container has nothing on the sensory overload of lathering up with a bar of hand-milled, soapy loveliness.
Surely the mindful ritual, something we all seem to be in search of right now, of treating ourselves to something beautiful, natural, artisanal, sustainable and relatively affordable, if not highly economical, is worth rethinking, and possibly one step towards cleaner living in the true sense of the word.