Slumber Soap - Moisturizing Fir Needle & Lavender Bar Soap - 4 oz Handmade

The bottle in your shower is mostly water and detergent, and it is built to be used up quickly.

Foaming body wash works by stripping oil efficiently, which is exactly why skin feels squeaky when you get out and why you reach for a lotion two minutes later. It also carries a fragrance compound, and that compound is the loudest thing in the room for the whole ten minutes you are in there.

A handmade bar is made the other way round.

• Saponified olive oil — the softest of the four oils, and the one that keeps the bar from stripping.
• Organic coconut and palm oil — the hard oils, and the reason warm water alone brings up a thick lather.
• Organic shea butter — saponified into the bar rather than added on top, which is why skin feels soft rather than tight.
• Fir needle and lavender essential oil — the entire scent, with no fragrance compound behind it.

A shower you take on autopilot is ten minutes that does nothing except get you clean. On the day that has already taken everything, that is a waste of the only ten minutes in it that belong to you.

FERNWOOD Slumber Soap is a handmade 4 oz bar: four saponified oils, two essential oils, parsley powder for the green and a mineral pigment for the blue.

• Skin that feels soft rather than stripped when you towel off.
• A bathroom that smells of fir needle and lavender for the whole shower.
• A bar that keeps its shape if you keep it dry.

Add warm water and work it up to a thick lather in your hands or on a cloth. Keep it dry between uses on a draining dish, out of the spray, and it will last a great deal longer than it will sitting in a puddle.

🚿 The first thirty seconds

It takes a moment longer to lather than a bottle does, and then it does not stop. Warm water and a few turns in your hands is all it needs. If nothing much is happening, the water is too cold.

🌲 What it actually smells like

Fir needle is resinous and green rather than sweet, and real lavender is sharper and more herbal than the purple bar in the supermarket. Together they read as wet wood and cut stems. It fills the room while the water is hot.

🧼 Drying off

This is where a bar earns its place. There is no squeak and no tight feeling across your shoulders and shins, because olive and shea are saponified into the bar rather than rinsed off it.

📆 The second week

Skin washed with detergent twice a day looks grey and feels papery. Two weeks in is usually where that stops being obvious, mostly on shins, forearms and the tops of shoulders.

💧 The one thing that shortens its life

Left under the shower head or sitting in water, a handmade bar softens and goes fast. On a draining dish, out of the spray, it dries between showers and holds together. That single habit makes more difference than anything else about the bar.

Soap is a cosmetic. It cleans, it changes how skin feels, and it makes a room smell of something. That is the honest limit of it, and it is more than most people ask of a shower.

So: skin that feels soft instead of stripped, a lather you do not have to fight for, and a bathroom that smells of fir needle and lavender for as long as the water is hot. All of that is fair. Anything with a medical name is not, and no scent does anything to you that you are not already doing yourself. If a patch of skin is spreading, painful, weeping or simply not settling, that is a doctor's job and not a bar of soap's.

Two facts worth stating plainly. The label gives no percentages for the essential oils, so nothing on this page claims a strength for either of them. And the colour comes from parsley powder and ultramarines, a mineral pigment, so this is a coloured bar rather than an uncoloured one.

It was made for the shower at the end of the day rather than the one that starts it.

It's especially for you if:

• There is a bottle of body wash in your shower that you did not choose and cannot remember buying.
• Your skin squeaks when you get out, and you had stopped noticing that it should not.
• You have tried a natural bar before and it turned to paste on the dish inside a fortnight.
• You would rather smell two oils you can name than a fragrance called something like Midnight Cedar.
• You are not looking for a routine with steps. You want ten minutes that are already in your day to be better than they are.

Handmade, 4 oz, made in the USA. Eight things on the label: four saponified oils, two essential oils, parsley powder and a mineral pigment. No fragrance compound and no exfoliant.

Chances are, this is the bar you have been looking for.

Your order today is backed by our 90-day guarantee. If FERNWOOD isn't right for you, return it within 90 days of delivery for a full refund. Simple as that.