High Adventures in the Great Outdoors
What makes great soap?
Well, there are certainly some basic that need to be accomplished in terms of making it fundamentally sound, however, there is a point when soapmaking becomes an art in itself and leave behind scientific foundations.
Having used soaps for aeons, I find that my favourite soap bars have some things in common, e.g. texture as well as lather and moisturizing abilities derived from fatty acids in the vegetable oils used, with different oils making different contributions and the calibration becoming a balancing act.
Enter Fucking Great Soap.
Incepted twenty years ago and inspired by the movie Fight Club, the soaps his brother and partners were creating to sell at the local farmers market and a dissatisfaction with soaps not being manufactured the Tyler Durden way, Patrick Shea eventually took over and commenced his own operations.
After a stint of inactivity, Patrick eventually got the itch again and after a period of trial and error, he refined his own idiosyncratic recipe, which proved to be quite popular amongst his circle of friends.
Working on refining his formula further and using organic ingredients wherever possible unless costs would become prohibitive and with the eye ultimately on making his emissions an affordable luxury, he has established a veritable soap company. While the soap bars are aesthetically pleasing and easy on the eye at times running danger of overwhelming me with the urge to take a bite, they are meant for use not display.
Fucking Great Soap’s emissions come in a myriad of handcrafted colourful variations with the common denominator being that they are not only long lasting and durable but deliver supremely in the lather department.
f a fun hobby and have built-in Christmas presents for my
Favourites of the range include Midnight Tryst, which fragrance-wise is an intriguing melange of Birchwood Oud, wild cypress, ozone, makrut lime, sea salt, oud, elemi, leather, amber, ocean moss, and frankincense, with the total resulting in much more than the mere sum of its parts.
A staple of the core range is the Man Bar, which despite what the name might suggest is much more nuanceful than what one might suspect, based on a carefully selected range of ingredients, i.e. activated charcoal powder with mahogany and a dominant musk fragrance oils, sitting against a backdrop of patchouli and clary sage essential oils.
Given the affordable price range, the quality and fun approach, it’d be difficult to find reasons to not give FGS a go and lather up.
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image from company website
