Sophia Vilensky is a freelance beauty writer at Marie Claire, where she writes about the latest and greatest skincare launches, hair colors, and Cardi B manicures. Her work can also be found at Byrdie, Bravo, and Us Weekly. You can find her on Instagram @sophiavilensky.
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," saysand 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 Still, today's soaps look slightly different than the boring bars people associate with their grandparents' sinks."Everyone grew up on Dial and Irish Spring. It was very simple back then," says, who founded Wary Meyers with her husband, John Meyers, and began making soap in 2015."When we started in the soap business it wasn't trendy. But now it's no longer outrageous." Today, the development of bar soap is seen as an art form, employing a new generation of artisans. O'Donnell estimates the handcrafted soap business in the U.S. has doubled since 2004. She believes the recent rise in popularity can be attributed to multiple causes: ample crafting time in the pandemic, the public's desire to understand ingredients, and soap's function as a recession-proof product. It's both utilitarian and luxurious.launched a bar soap version of their beloved Milky Jelly Cleanser: the Milky Jelly Cleansing Bar."Bar soaps might feel like an old tradition, but they're having a resurgence," says, the brand's chief marketing officer."Consumers are looking for sustainable, concentrated, and gentle bar formulas that they can use in multiple areas." With other bright and shiny new companies like D.S. & DURGA , Fenty Beauty, Drunk Elephant, and Nécessaire also adding bar soaps to their repertoires, legacy soap brands like Caswell-Massey and Ivory are holding strong. The real driver of the current boom, however, is social media, where soap-cutting and sudsing ASMR videos constantly loop.s first bar of soap went viral, she received more orders than she could fill."We were making it on folding tables in our stock area," says Swenk, whose company now boasts nearly a million TikTok followers and has outgrown multiple warehouses. Today, fans from all over travel to Sparta's quaint North Carolina store and stock up on sold-out-online bars. Whether makers are using rare ingredients such as algae or rice bran or marketing their brand in momentous ways, the world of soap making is becoming more vibrant—while still retaining the old-world feel that makes cleansing with bar soap so comforting., whose bar soaps are hand-mixed, hand-cut, and hand-wrapped in Los Angeles."It turns the process into a ritual and it's my favorite way to wake up. There's something pure and simplistic about a bar of soap—it's tactile and sensorial."$12 at Billow Cloud Soaps Marie Claire email subscribers get intel on fashion and beauty trends, hot-off-the-press celebrity news, and more. Sign up here.Sophia Vilensky is a freelance beauty writer at Marie Claire, where she writes about the latest and greatest skincare launches, hair colors, and Cardi B manicures. Her work can also be found at Byrdie, Bravo, and Us Weekly. You can find her on InstagramChanning Tatum Is Fiancé of the Year as Zoë Kravitz' Dad Lenny Receives Hollywood Walk of Fame Star
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