Read the ingredient list on this bar the way a perfumer would and the name on the box starts to look like a modest understatement. After the three saponified oils and water come lavandin, rosemary, patchouli, lemongrass, red thyme and clove bud, six essential oils in descending order of quantity, and thyme, the herb the bar is named for, sits fifth of the six. What Acure has actually made is an herb-garden bar: camphorous lavandin and rosemary on top, earthy patchouli and sharp lemongrass through the middle, red thyme and clove giving it a warm, medicinal, faintly spiced floor. It smells wonderful, in the way a crowded kitchen garden in late summer smells wonderful, and it is the most interesting scent on the natural-soap shelf by some distance. It is also, for exactly that reason, the bar in this collection that asks the most of the skin it is used on.
Underneath the perfume is the chassis the whole Farm Collection shares, and it deserves the same credit here as elsewhere. Sunflower, coconut and palm oils are saponified with lye into a true cold-process soap: sunflower for a mild, creamy lather, coconut for the foam and the cleaning muscle, palm for a loaf hard enough to last weeks on a draining dish. Apricot Lane Farms' organic cold-pressed avocado oil is added late enough to survive as a superfat, ground clove gives the pale khaki bar its dark speckle and a faint grit, and rosemary extract keeps the oils from going off. Thirteen ingredients, no synthetic detergent, a paper box, and the regenerative farm on the label. As construction goes, it is honest work.
In the shower it does what a coconut-rich true soap does, which is clean thoroughly. The lather is dense for a natural bar, the rinse is squeaky, and oily or combination body skin, which is where Acure's own guide places this bar, comes out feeling freshly scrubbed and slightly tight in a way that reads as clean rather than stripped. The avocado superfat softens that a little; a lotion on damp skin softens it properly. On dry skin the same thoroughness turns into stripping within a few days, especially on shins and hands in winter, and the bar is simply the wrong tool. The scent fills a steamy bathroom for a few minutes and is mostly gone from the skin within the hour, which for a bar this perfumed is a mercy.
The case against it is the same as the case for it, and it needs to be made plainly. Six essential oils are six sources of fragrance, and these six between them contribute linalool from the lavandin, citral from the lemongrass, eugenol from the clove bud, thymol from the red thyme, and limonene from more than one of them. That is not a scary list because the oils are natural; it is a notable list because those specific molecules are the ones that turn up most often as positives in patch-test clinics, and regulators in Europe require most of them to be declared by name on a label for that reason. Rinse-off exposure is much lower than leave-on, and the majority of people with healthy skin will use this bar for years and never react. But a person with eczema, a compromised barrier, a history of fragrance allergy, or simply skin that has ever gone red under a scented product is looking at the single most allergen-dense bar in the range, sitting on an alkaline base that removes more of the skin's own lipid than a synthetic bar would. For that person the herb garden is not worth the visit.
It is also worth deflating the one claim the name invites. Thyme has an antibacterial reputation, and thymol, the dominant molecule in red thyme oil, does earn it in a laboratory dish, which is why it appears in mouthwash. In this bar the thyme oil is a minor note, present at a fraction of a percent and washed away in seconds, and it does nothing to the skin's bacteria that the soap is not already doing by physically rinsing them off. Acure does not claim antibacterial action and neither should the reader; the thyme here is a scent, and a lovely one, and that is the whole of its job. The same goes for the collection's regenerative-agriculture story, which is admirable farming and not a skin benefit.
At eight dollars for a four-ounce loaf the price is fair for a real cold-process bar with genuine essential oils, a superfat and a carton, below the artisan bars it resembles and above a drugstore loaf, and because the palm-hardened bar wears slowly the cost per shower is small. The practical complication is finding one: it appears to be the smallest run of the four and is sold out on Acure's site as this is written, with the farm's own shop not carrying it at all, so the quartet is sometimes the only way in. A year on sale and a few dozen pooled reviews make for a thin record, but a soap this simple in construction, and this legible in its risks, does not need a long one.
The recommendation, then, is narrow and warm. If your body skin is oily or combination, resilient, unshaved that morning and has never reacted to a perfumed product, and if the idea of washing with a whole herb garden appeals, this is a genuinely distinctive bar, well built and fairly priced, and worth chasing when it is in stock. If your skin is dry, sensitive, eczema-prone or fragrance-reactive, if you are buying for a child, or if you wanted a bar that simply smells of thyme, one of its plainer siblings or a fragrance-free syndet bar will serve you far better. Acure has made a perfumer's soap and, to its credit, pointed it at oily skin; it just left the fragrance arithmetic for the reader to do.
