Finding out what is in this bar took a detour. Acure's own product page for the Lavender Bar Soap displays two ingredient lists, and both belong to other bars: one is the oatmeal bar's, with oats and clove and cassia, and one is the peppermint bar's, with menthol crystals and wheatgrass. The formula for the lavender bar itself turns up on the shop of the farm partner, Apricot Lane Farms, and it is eleven ingredients long: saponified sunflower, coconut and palm oils, water, sweet orange oil, lavandin oil, tangerine peel oil, the farm's avocado oil, annatto seed powder, orange peel powder and rosemary extract. Two things follow from that list. The bar is a genuine cold-process soap, which is worth respecting. And it is not really a lavender bar: the lavender note is lavandin, the camphorous hybrid grown for perfumery, and it sits behind sweet orange and tangerine, so the saffron-coloured bar in the lime-green box smells of citrus with a herbal edge. That is a pleasant thing to smell of and an inaccurate thing to be called, and both deserve saying before the soap is judged.
Judged as soap, it is good. The three-oil base is the traditional one and it is balanced sensibly: sunflower for a creamy, mild lather, coconut for bubbles and cleaning, palm for a bar hard enough to last four to six weeks in the shower without dissolving into the dish. The lather is richer than most natural bars manage, the rinse is clean with the faint squeak that true soap leaves, and the avocado oil, eighth on the list and unsaponified, is the superfat, a little free oil that stays on the skin after rinsing and takes the edge off the drying pull. Annatto gives the bar its warm orange colour and ground orange peel gives it faint speckles and the barest grain, neither of which does anything for the skin and both of which make the bar look handmade, which is the point. There is no synthetic surfactant, no preservative beyond rosemary extract, and a paper box instead of plastic. It is old-fashioned soap made carefully, at a price that is a little high for a bar and reasonable for one this hard. The lather deserves a second mention, because natural bars so often disappoint there: this one builds a proper cream between the hands in a few seconds, holds it through a body wash, and does not leave the gummy film on the skin that soft, poorly cured bars do, which is the palm and the curing doing their quiet work.
The limit is soap's limit, and it should not be softened by the ingredient count. True soap is alkaline, with a pH around nine or ten, and it removes more of the skin's own lipid than a synthetic detergent bar formulated near skin pH; that is why dermatologists steer dry and eczema-prone skin toward syndet bars, and no number of organic oils changes the chemistry. On normal, oily and combination skin this bar cleans well and the superfat keeps it comfortable; on dry skin a tightness builds over a few days of daily showering and a lotion on damp skin becomes necessary rather than optional; on eczema-prone, cracked or winter-dry skin it is the wrong bar, and the oatmeal version in the same collection is milder but still a true soap. Add the three essential oils, orange, tangerine and lavandin, all carrying limonene and linalool, and the bar is also the wrong choice for anyone with a fragrance allergy, however good the farm.
The farm gets its fair sentence. Apricot Lane Farms is a genuine regenerative operation and a reasonable thing to feel warmly about, and its avocado oil at eighth place in a rinse-off bar leaves behind a faint softness that would be there whichever orchard grew it. The palm oil deserves a sentence too: it is the fourth ingredient, it is why the bar is hard, and shoppers who avoid palm should know it is present, since the collection's organic-oils language does not advertise it.
Eight dollars for four ounces is more than a drugstore bar and less than the artisan bars this one resembles, and at four to six weeks in the shower or two to three months at a sink it works out cheaply enough. A year in, with sixty-five reviews on the brand's site, the pattern is consistent: creamy lather, a bar that lasts, a scent that is more orange than lavender and fades fast on the skin, tightness on dry skin, and a good-looking object in the bathroom. Every one of those is in the eleven ingredients, once they are found.
So the recommendation is easy for the right skin. Normal, oily and combination skin that likes a hard, creamy, natural bar with a bright citrus-herbal scent, a paper box and a farm on the label will enjoy this and get weeks out of it. Dry skin should keep lotion beside it, eczema-prone and fragrance-sensitive skin should choose a syndet bar, and anyone buying it for the lavender should smell it in the shop, because the box and the bar disagree.
