Photo by © Nadia-Clabassi | Pexels
Soap. It’s humble, it’s habitual. But while modern skincare trends lean towards multi-step and high-tech routines, French women know a little secret: sometimes a good bar of soap is all you really need.
Not just any bar, though. In French hands, soap takes on a luxurious quality. Cold-processed, scented with essential-oils and infused with nourishing ingredients — like olive oil, shea butter, or donkey milk — French soaps are crafted slowly and with serious savoir-faire.
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You’ll find them throughout the French home: a weighty slab beside the kitchen sink, a delicately scented bar in a porcelain dish, a wrapped rectangle slipped into a linen drawer — part ritual, part skincare. Choosing the right one is often a process. Function comes first — hands, face, body, even dishes, all have different needs. Then scent, which the French, naturally, take seriously. Finding your soap is a quiet art and testing out a few necessary to find the right balance of nourishment, fragrance and tactile pleasure.
Whether you prefer a solid bar or a liquid pump, the French have made the best of both. Here’s our edit of seven we keep returning to, to elevate our everyday.
Fragonard’s Ginger & Heliotrope Soap
From the iconic Grasse-based perfume house, this spicy-floral soap is made for those who like their lather with a hint of escapism. Warm ginger and sweet heliotrope evoke distant spice markets and the perfumed air of Mughal gardens. Biodegradable and minimally packaged, it comes with its own ceramic dish — a practical, beautiful detail. Long-lasting and richly scented, it’s made to be gifted (or kept).
Marin Montagut’s Bonjour Sicile Soap
Artist, collector and Parisian tastemaker Marin Montagut has bottled up Mediterranean sunshine in this orange blossom soap. Inspired by his travels to Sicily and handmade in Grasse, it’s wrapped in dreamy marbled paper and smells like warm breezes and citrus groves.
Crafted without palm oil or silicones, it’s gentle enough for daily or adds charm tucked between some linens. The scent is subtle: dewy and sun-warmed, rather than cloying. It turns a mundane hand wash into a fragrant escape — and the wrapping is too good to throw away.
Bienaimé 1935 Liquid Soap
Crafted using traditional Marseille saponification and plant-based oils, Bienaimé’s liquid soap is where heritage technique meets quiet luxury. Encased in a weighty glass flacon, it’s part skincare, part objet to be admired, especially when styled in a French-inspired bathroom, alongside a stack of freshly pressed linen towels.
Their signature scent, “La Vie en Fleurs,” is a soft,floral and slightly powdery. Raspberry and mandarin lift a heart of peony and violet, with grounding notes of iris, musk and heliotrope. It lathers into a silky foam, rinses without a trace and leaves behind a subtle, lingering scent — elegant, nostalgic, unmistakably French.
Esprit Provence’s Organic Donkey Milk Soap
Donkey milk may sound niche, but it’s an ancient skincare secret that’s making a very chic comeback. This soap from Esprit Provence is made with organic donkey milk from an open-range farm in the Pyrenees, where animal welfare is a priority and the milk is harvested ethically. Intensely nourishing, it’s packed with fatty acids and vitamins that calm sensitive or dry skin, and comes paired with a reusable ceramic dish. The texture is especially soft and creamy; the scent subtle and comforting — like clean linen and almond milk. Ideal for reactive skin or sudden cold weather, it leaves behind a velvet-like finish.
Orris Le Quartet
Handcrafted in the South of France using traditional cold-process methods and cured for six weeks, these French soaps are superfatted to leave a nourishing veil of plant lipids on the skin. Designed for face, hands, and body, they offer a quiet kind of luxury — and an invitation to embrace Orris’ ethos: ritual over routine, intention over haste.
The Le Quartet set includes four sculptural bars, each tailored to a specific skin need. Le Botaniste, with French green clay and olive oil hydrates and repairs; La Déesse is a purifying blend of charcoal and moringa oil; Le Nomade, with tumeric, is calming and anti-inflammatory; and Le Soliste, brightens and conditions with rice milk and camellia oil. Lightly scented with essential oils and free from synthetics or palm oil, they’re ingredient-led, elevated and designed to live beautifully on any bathroom shelf.
Cie Luxe’s Liquid Marseille Soap
For something fresh and fruit-forward, this fig-scented liquid Marseille soap is a classic. Made in a traditional cauldron —like the original Marseille cubes — it uses local vegetable oils and natural surfactants. The scent is lush but not overpowering. A touch of green and a whisper of sweet woodiness. The chic glass bottle is refillable, and the soap is gentle enough for frequent use, even on dry hands. A kitchen sink staple.
Alix D Reynis’ Organic Soap
Last but by no mean’s least: a soap that’s as beautiful as the porcelain it’s often sold beside. Alix D Reynis’ cold-saponified bars are handmade in France and enriched with organic coconut milk. Choose a classic scent, like Fleur, or opt for the warmer Pompadour with soft amber notes and a hint of incense. These soaps are safe for sensitive skin, babies and even allergy-prone users, making them the understated star of your daily routine.
Written by Madeleine Piggott
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