Recently, a friend asked if I’d ever heard of “Low-y.” He then went on to describe an incredible-smelling hand soap he had discovered while visiting the restroom at a fancy event. By his account, this soap smelled as freshly crisp as a snapped vine — dewy and earthy at the same time, like a garden. He had become obsessed with tracking it down, having taken a photo of the bottle only to discover: “That shit was $90!”
We were talking, of course, about the Loewe Tomato Leaves hand soap. (Reader, he bought it.) And whilst I was still reeling from the novelty of pronouncing Loewe for a friend who’s clearly also entered the "paying too much for ordinary stuff” era of their life, I felt a kinship in his sense of indignation. Are we all out here paying $90 for soap?
Historically speaking, hand soap isn’t a product category known to inspire much of anything on its own merits. It’s more often thought of as a boring bathroom staple — albeit one that, as many shrewd marketers have figured out, is literally unavoidable in our daily activities. No wonder the brands have moved in. Now, the strategic placement of a bottle of Dries Van Noten or Santa Maria Novella hand soap in one’s bathroom is all but designed to elicit envy and admiration. At a time when “taste,” as defined by our consumption habits, can be broadcast and replicated throughout social media, opportunities to status-signal essentially come down to any chance we have to do some visual name-dropping.
What’s always funny is to note how certain names then cycle in and out of vogue. Originally, the Byredo hand soap bottle was the luxe way to decorate your bathroom sink, care of Into The Gloss’s popular Top Shelf (or #topshelfie for the private citizens featured) franchise, which editorialized aspirational women in fashion (or just in New York City), circa 2010. It was the first totem of rich people hand soap I can remember amongst 2010s editors and influencers. Then it was Aesop’s Resurrection Aromatique hand soap that was “a fixture by the basins of some of the world’s best-appointed restaurants” (according to Aesop’s website) starting in 2006, before it eventually became a proxy for a certain subset of modern yuppies who could flex their bathroom accoutrement on Instagram. Then of course, tomato-scented hand soap started gaining popularity in 2020 amid pandemic-sanctioned add-to-cart fever, driven by, yes, Loewe’s fêted entry into beauty and home, and Flamingo Estate’s chic gardener aesthetic.
The idea of “status hand soap” inevitably became a cultural touchpoint. The Aesop soap-havers were side-eyed, memed, and condemned to continuously rebuy a $47 hand soap or suffer the humiliation of being caught refilling it with off-brand soap (solve: never have house guests?). Byredo’s frosted, sans-serif’d bottle was mimicked by a handful of brands that were also betting on Big Soap to appeal to the posting class. While some of us in humbler tax brackets may have clung to our Mrs. Meyers hand soap scents with zodiac-like affinity (I’m a Rhubarb sun, Basil rising), the allure of status hand soap was hard to contest: After all, it offered a way to sample a luxury lifestyle for a fraction of the cost. They're expensive, sure, but not so expensive as to be totally unattainable. It’s the millennial avocado toast index all over again.
That said, the only times I’ve had a luxury status soap in my house were when it came gifted. I do recommend experiencing the thrill of it, at least once, to see if you’re going to become the type of person who would like to pay about $1.10 per hand-washing. While I enjoy a chest-tightening splurge every now and then, the idea of paying so much for something I literally send down the drain frankly doesn’t inspire me. Luxury is many things, and in my opinion, that includes the ability to reuse something precious often and possibly pass it down.
Despite their uniquely delicious scents and decadent lather, I cannot quite get past the overt branding of it all — how displaying a status soap in your bathroom is not entirely unlike wearing a T-shirt where the giant designer logo is the whole point. I remember once visiting the bathroom of a date, immediately confronted with a bottle of Aesop hand soap (authentic, not a refill) there, in his studio loft in Williamsburg. It was such an incongruous artifact to me, considering that mere hours ago, this date had opted to split the bill — a gesture I hadn’t minded before it appeared he was reserving his budget for conspicuous home goods. (I would soon learn this is not an original experience — laying bare the inherent irony in the Tomato Leaves life when you’re not actually making true Tomato Leaves bucks). Elevated everyday rituals are one thing; a slightly random sink-side flex is another.
As I survey the current field of status hand soaps, I don’t see a clear contender for Loewe’s tomato-y crown yet, but that’s likely a testament to how hand soap has generally become a much more considered household purchase. The competition for the sink placement has grown fierce at every point of the taste food chain: in filling its locker rooms with Grown Alchemist and then Le Labo, for example, Equinox alone has taught a whole new generation of gym-inclined tech bros to adopt those brands as a signifier of luxury. But these days, you don’t need a hotel, luxury gym, spa, or fancy restaurant to put them onto nice soap (though apparently Coqadaq in New York offers a veritable “buffet” of various status soaps for you to sample, per a recent IG post from the food critic J. Lee): the taste-chasers have now become well-trained to seek out their own forms of sink-side expression. The soap sitting on your bathroom sink is liable to tell on you, the way you'd expect your shoes or handbag to.
Some favorites I’ve noticed: Malin+Goetz’s Dark Rum hand soap remains a popular pick amongst responsible working professionals who may still be wearing no-show socks. Compagnie De Provence’s bold-font bottle of Liquid Marseille Soap is cheerful in an expensive French farmhouse kind of way. People still covet Byredo and Diptyque’s hand soaps for their scents and their beautiful packaging. I’ve been noticing less mainstream brands like Ortegia Sicily, Astier De Villate, and Sangra de Fruta quietly emerging as a new IFYKY quiet luxury hand soap. (I saw the Ortegia amenities in a hotel in Montauk this summer and was charmed by its funky maximalist design.) The whole tomato thing has clearly inspired people to lean towards the unexpected for their respective luxurious lathering experience, and I imagine soap “tourism” — snapping up soaps from increasingly exotic locales — will inevitably become the new candle-as-souvenir. I’ve already spied a handful of French soap-on-a-stick dispensers (for true hand soap freaks) in several people’s Euro-trip carousels this summer.
Sure, overthinking hand soap may be silly! It’s an essential good with the duty of keeping an establishment within health and safety codes. But there are only so many ways to broadcast one's status in the home, and the brands aren’t wrong in that soap does hold a great deal of sensory and aesthetic potential. Otherwise, we’d all still be stuck with the colorful fish in the Softsoap bottles of our youths, or whatever that pink goop was pumped into every high school restroom. In my childhood home, the ever-present bottle of amber-colored Dial soap was simply how the world worked. Somewhere along the way (the 2000s), some clever marketing agency or two decided that we deserve little luxuries in our homes, and now I find myself in a Target aisle, beguiled into decision paralysis by the intoxicatingly soothing scents of the Method hand soap range. I’m all for it, even while I’m skeptical that the “express yourself” ethos must now extend to what’s sitting next to the faucet. Perhaps we’ve gone slightly overboard if we expect our hand soap to telegraph the fact that we’re more Telfar than Sambas, or if the reality of budgeting out our Le Labo Santal hand soap has started to get stressful.
I get the ‘let people have nice things’ argument, and of course a Dior or Hermes hand soap is much more affordable than a bag. But it does get to a point, as they say — for me, this point is well under $90. Seeing an $80+ hand soap in a landlord-special bathroom is the kind of allegory I attribute to our inherited economy that makes actual home ownership that much more elusive, while offering a literal drip of luxury to stave off total class anxiety. I suppose small extravagances can make us feel closer to a life we want before the state of the rental market brings us back down to reality. And at least you can keep the Loewe bottle. I have it on good authority that you can refill it with Mrs. Meyer's Tomato Vine hand soap, and it works just as well.
