Your shampoo, without the bottle
The Provence Journal · Solid Shampoo Bar
Look at the shelf in your shower. Count what is standing there. For most of us it is three bottles — shampoo, a second shampoo for the weeks the first one stops working, and a conditioner that promises to undo whatever the other two did.
Now consider what is actually inside them. Liquid shampoo is mostly water. You are buying water, shipping water, storing water in plastic, and paying for the privilege three times over.
A solid shampoo bar is simply shampoo with the water left out. What remains is the part that does the work on your hair.
One bar replaces up to three bottles of liquid shampoo.
What is in it
Four things, chosen for what each one does rather than for what it says on a label.
Organic olive oil — the foundation of everything we make in Provence. It cleanses without stripping, which is the whole difficulty with washing hair. Most shampoos solve for lather and let moisture fend for itself.
Coconut oil — the source of the lather. There is a particular creaminess to coconut oil in a triple-milled bar that is difficult to describe until you have felt it in your hands.
Glycerin — draws moisture toward the hair rather than away from it.
Keratin — the protein hair is already made of. It is here for strength and shine, and it is the reason this bar suits fine hair and thick hair equally.
The bar is dermatologist tested and suitable for all hair types. There is no plastic anywhere in it — the bar arrives in a small kraft box and nothing else.
What your hair will notice
The first thing is the lather. People expect a bar to be sparing with it and are usually surprised — the coconut oil sees to that, and a triple-milled bar gives it up densely rather than in a thin foam.
The second is what your scalp feels like afterwards. A shampoo that strips leaves a particular tightness behind, and you tend not to notice it until something stops doing it. Olive oil cleanses without taking the moisture with it, which is why this bar suits scalps that have found other shampoos too much.
The third takes a little longer. Keratin is the protein your hair is already built from, and hair that has it tends to look like hair that has it — smoother where it lies flat, with more light coming off it. Not a transformation. A steadiness.
And because it is one bar rather than three bottles, there is nothing layered on top of anything else. Fine hair in particular tends to prefer this. Less is genuinely less.
Why triple milling matters here
Triple milling is an old French method and a slow one. The soap is pressed three separate times, which forces out air and excess water and compresses what is left into something dense and even.
For a body bar this means longevity. For a shampoo bar it means rather more. A softly pressed bar dissolves quickly in a wet shower and turns to paste. A triple-milled bar does not. It holds its shape, its colour and its structure from the first wash to the last.
This is the reason so many people have tried a shampoo bar once, watched it disintegrate on the shelf within a fortnight, and quietly gone back to bottles. The method is not the problem. The pressing is.
Pressed three times, so it does not surrender to the shower.
How to use it
Wet your hair thoroughly. Wet the bar. Then either glide the bar directly along your scalp two or three times, or work it between your palms and bring the lather to your head. Both are correct. The first is quicker; the second gives you more control over how much you use.
Massage into the scalp with your fingertips, as you would with any shampoo. Rinse until the water runs clear. Rinsing is the step people rush, and it is the step that determines how your hair feels when it dries.
Give it a few washes before you judge it. Hair takes a little time to settle into any change of routine, and the first wash is rarely the one that tells you the truth.
Looking after the bar
Very little is required. Ours does not dissolve in the shower, nor lose its colour or its scent. Set it somewhere it can drain and it will look much the same in week five as it did on the first morning.
One bar lasts four to six weeks of daily washing. It travels without a bag, without a bottle, and without a conversation at airport security.
Fewer things, chosen better, kept longer.
There is a habit in Provence of keeping few things and keeping them well. A single good knife. One copper pan. A bar of soap on the edge of the basin that has been there long enough to belong to the room.
Three bottles on a shelf is not a ritual. It is an accumulation. One bar, pressed three times in Provence and made to last the month, is something closer to a choice.
Avec gratitude,
Averal Provence