What Actually Goes Into a Dr. Ancient Bar

If you turn over most soap and try reading the label, you'll need a chemistry degree. We'd rather you could read ours in about ten seconds. So here it is, in plain English.

It starts with olive oil

Every bar begins with food-grade virgin olive oil, the kind you'd happily cook with. We mix it with cottonseed oil, which has been used in soapmaking around the eastern Mediterranean for generations, plus water and lye.

People sometimes worry when they see lye (sodium hydroxide) on the list. It's what turns oil into soap, and you can't make real soap without it. By the time the bar is finished, the lye has done its work and none of it is left.

A little extra oil

Right at the end of cooking, we add some oil that doesn't turn into soap. Soapmakers call this superfatting. It means a thin layer of oil stays on your skin after you rinse, which is why our bars don't leave that tight, squeaky feeling some soaps do.

Then each bar gets its own character

On top of the olive oil base, every bar has one or two things that make it what it is. Some have milk, like donkey milk or goat milk. Some have plants: stinging nettle, wild pistacia (bittim), St John's wort, turmeric, black seed oil or black rose. Others use minerals such as sulphur, clay or charcoal. A few carry a pure essential oil, like lavender, sandalwood, bitter orange or tea tree. And then there's pine tar, which has a smell you'll either love or not.

We don't add perfume

Not in any bar, not ever. Most of our soaps simply smell like soap, or like whatever's in them. The ones with essential oils have a softer scent than you might expect, and it won't hang around on your skin all day. That's what happens when there are no chemical fixatives holding it there.

What you won't find

No SLS or SLES, no sulfates, no parabens, no silicones, no palm oil, no synthetic preservatives, no hardeners and no artificial colours.

Leaving those out does change things a bit. The lather is creamy rather than big and bubbly, and if you leave the bar sitting in a puddle it'll go soft. Put it on a soap dish that drains and it'll last you a good while.

Worth knowing

Most of our bars are plant-based. The Donkey Milk, Goat Milk, Snail and Tallow bars aren't, because of what's in them. Every bar contains cottonseed oil, and the Bittim bar contains wild pistacia, which belongs to the pistachio family. You'll find the full ingredient list on each product page, and it's always sensible to try a new soap on a small patch of skin first.

Each product page lists exactly what's in that bar.