The Benefits Of Olive Oil Soap. And The Three Claims That Are Nonsense.

The benefits of olive oil soap are real, and about half of what gets claimed for it is not. We sell the stuff, so treat everything below with the suspicion it deserves — but we would rather be the page that crossed the wrong ones out than the seventh page in a row reciting them.

Three that hold up. Three that do not. In that order, because the second list is more fun.

What are the benefits of olive oil soap?

1. It is genuinely mild

This one is true and it is the only one that really matters. Soap cleans by stripping oil, and how aggressively it strips depends on which fats it was made from. Olive oil produces a soap with a small, slow lather that removes less of your skin's own oil than a coconut-heavy bar does. That is why almost every very-sensitive-skin soap in the world is olive-based, and it is why the traditional Mediterranean bars are made this way.

The trade-off is that mild soap is not exciting. It does not squeak. If you associate clean with a tight, squeaky feeling, that feeling is your skin barrier being removed, and our soap will feel like it is not working for about a week.

2. It keeps its glycerin

Saponification produces glycerin as a by-product. Industrial manufacturers routinely extract it, because glycerin is worth more sold separately into cosmetics than left in a supermarket bar. Small-batch cold process soap keeps it, because removing it is an extra industrial step nobody in a room with a drain in the floor is set up to do.

Glycerin is a humectant: it draws water toward itself. In a bar of soap that means a slightly less drying wash. It also means the bar goes soft if you leave it in standing water, which is the same property being annoying.

3. The ingredient list is short enough to read

Olive oil, water, lye, and whatever was mixed in for the scent. That is not a health claim. It is a transparency claim, and it is the only one we can make without a laboratory. If something in your bathroom is irritating your skin, a product with four ingredients is a much easier suspect to eliminate than a product with thirty.

And the three that are nonsense

It is rich in antioxidants and vitamin E

This is on nearly every olive oil soap page on the internet and it is the one we find most irritating, because it is true of olive oil and largely irrelevant to soap.

Saponification is a chemical reaction that consumes the oil. The polyphenols and tocopherols that make olive oil worth eating do not survive it intact in meaningful quantity, and whatever fraction does survive is then rinsed off your skin within ninety seconds. Antioxidants in a wash-off product are a sentence, not a mechanism. Eat the oil.

It is pH balanced for your skin

It is not, and it cannot be. Real soap sits somewhere around pH 9 to 10. Skin sits around 5. There is no such thing as pH-balanced soap — the moment you bring a true soap down to skin pH it stops being soap and falls apart. Products that genuinely are pH-balanced are syndet bars, which are detergents shaped like soap.

Skin re-acidifies itself within a couple of hours, which is why washing with soap has been survivable for several thousand years. But if a page tells you their olive oil soap is pH balanced, they either do not know what they are selling or they are hoping you do not. Ours is alkaline and we publish the number.

It cures eczema, psoriasis and acne

Soap does not cure a skin condition. It is a thing you wash with for forty seconds and then remove. A mild soap can stop making an existing condition worse, which is a genuinely useful thing and is not the same sentence at all.

We get asked this often enough that there is a separate entry on sensitive skin, eczema and faces that answers it properly, including the people who should not use our soap.

How long does a bar of olive oil soap last?

Six to eight weeks of daily use for one person, if you keep it dry between washes. Ten days if you leave it sitting in water on the edge of the bath, which is the single most common reason people conclude handmade soap is poor value.

High-olive soap is hard and slow, but the same glycerin that makes it gentle also attracts water, so a bar left in a puddle absorbs it and turns to paste from the bottom up. A dish that drains fixes this entirely. It is not a design flaw in the soap. It is a design flaw in most soap dishes.

So is olive oil soap worth buying?

If you want a mild, slow, four-ingredient bar that will not strip your skin and will last two months if you keep it out of the puddle: yes, and you do not need to buy ours specifically. Any high-olive bar from somebody who names their region will do the same job.

If you want the antioxidants, buy the oil and put it on bread.

What separates one olive oil soap from another is mostly the oil and the cure, which is why we go on at length about which olive it comes from and what to check on a label when you are buying Greek olive oil soap. Everything we make is on the range, with prices and without photography.