A Scent Apart
For many customers the main selling point of any Thomas Clipper soap will be that they feature our range of incredible men's fragrances.
Developed in Grasse, France, the home of fragrance, each of our bars features the original Thomas Clipper scents that you can find in our men's colognes, making them the only way to enjoy your morning shower with the same sophisticated, subtle and characterful scents that we offer bottled on our website and across the world.
Add to that our unique minimalist design and small-batch production and it's perhaps not a surprise that our first batch of soaps sold out just a few days after release. But there's more to our newest product line than good looks and world class fragrance...
Better For Your Skin
At Thomas Clipper the first concern is always performance. So in developing our soap, our mission was to find a formula that cleansed thoroughly without leaving the skin dry, the holy grail in the jui-jitsu of soap creation. So to speak.
Many ingredients go into making a quality soap, but one reason that the Thomas Clipper formula is better for your skin is that it doesn't contain any Sodium Lauryl Sulfate (SLS). Incidentally, many brands would say this means our soaps are in fact 'body bars' or 'cleansing bricks' or some other soap-but-not-soap name. We prefer to keep things simple and just call them 'soaps', but they are made in a completely different way to your normal mass market bar.
To go into the weeds a little, SLS is a surfactant - simply put it's used to make soaps lather, which is great because we all love bubbly soap. But it has the undesirable side effect of drying out your skin. Nobody likes the feeling of washing his hands with a bar of sub par soap and feeling somehow dry, even as our hands are dripping wet. That feeling is caused by SLS.
Obsessive Sourcing
Of course you can't just remove SLS and leave it at that. Our soaps use lots of other clever ingredients to achieve superior performance without the drying effect. In the hunt for alternatives, there are minefields. We know you demand impeccable sourcing, so we've been as uncompromising with our material choice as we are with our performance requirements.
Our bars are all organic, meaning they've got a lower footprint on the environment. The palm derived oils used are certified sustainable by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO).
The question of palm oil is complex, and we'd be the first to argue that clear cut palm oil is overused in everything from food to cosmetics: as a rule, if it's not sustainably certified, avoid it. But if it's farmed sustainably, palm oil can bring economic advantages to communities in developing countries and, because it's such an efficient crop, it can be farmed with a lower physical footprint than alternatives. As such, choosing RSPO certified and organic palm ingredients was, in our opinion, the most sustainable option. We're paying a little extra and that encourages communities to farm sustainably, creating a virtuous cycle.
Solid Beats Liquid
We know that many people use shower gels, but you might be aware that solid skincare - which includes soaps and solid body scrubs like ours - is on the rise. Solid products (instead of liquid gels etc.) perform better with less water or waste, and use far less CO2 in production.
All in, a study carried out by the Institute of Environmental Engineering in Zurich suggests that solid skincare has around ten times less environmental impact. Let that sink in: ten times less impact. Golly.
We actually emailed the authors of the study to make sure we'd understood correctly, and a representative sent us a copy of the study with the following statement:
"According to figure 2c ... the statement of „factor 10“ (approx.) is confirmed."
Well that's that settled. We love Swiss accuracy!
Hand Poured In Small Batches
By working with small businesses in the UK, we're able to get the highest possible quality product. Each bar is slightly different, showing the marks of the making process and adding a personal touch.
More than that we're helping to build up local artisans and reduce our waste in production by only making what we need (this is why we are sold out sometimes on the site, for which we apologise - demand has been consistently higher than we've expected, but we're catching up!).
