The products: Rocky Mountain Soap Co. Natural Bar Soap (April 2018 Shea Butter reformulation)
Things are different. I’m not single, but I feel like I am: alone; adrift. I miss living with my best friend. I miss having someone else in my life who legitimately loved Rocky Mountain Soap Co. as much as I do – and would have been psyched to find out that their soap bars had been reformulated to be more hydrating.
But more than that, I miss having someone who could see why I selected each of the words I’d use to talk about it. Someone with all of these beautiful words to share – a sleeplessness to match my own, and a drive to play with language. (I miss your gorgeous, multi-clause sentences. I miss that half of your jokes are told in other languages, largely dead.)
I’ve been using Rocky Mountain Soap Co. products since before I can remember. When I was growing up, they were a hokey, hippie brand – awkward packaging and greasy formulations. (I don’t mean that negatively – I’m an Albertan despite my better judgement; I love a greasy hand butter almost as much as I love a good flannel shirt.)
Then, a few years back, the company went through a total re-brand, right down to the stores themselves.
Today’s Rocky Mountain Soap Co. is gorgeous and hip, with all of the same great ingredients as before (but way cooler packaging.) They managed what most brands never will: to take a well-loved favourite from years gone by and make it relevant again.
The Rocky Mountain Soap Co shea butter formula
I’m not good at the things that I want to be. (Or, rather, I’m good at things I would prefer not to be good at). But the Rocky Mountain Soap Company has their shit figured out: they’re good–no, great–at soap. Their natural soap bars are nourishing and full of natural ingredients, and above all else, they’re an affordable luxury. These aren’t $25 bars of soap – they’re $5.95 CAD bars, in lovely paper packaging.
Rocky Mountain Soap Co’s soap bars are handmade in small batches in the Canadian Rocky Mountains (yes, really). Their team has been working on a reformulation for a while, which officially launches April 2018. The new bars are just as cleansing as the old ones, with a slightly slipperier, creamier lather.
The new bars are identical in scents and shape to the old ones, but they now contain fair trade, organic Baraka shea butter hand-made by women and families from the Kperisi village in Northern Ghana. It’s blended with coconut oil, olive oil, and sunflower oil, and the brand new formula means that the Rocky brand can now say that all of their products are GMO-free. (The old formula contained soybean oil, cottonseed oil, and canola oil.)
Why shea? Well, shea butter (and especially this one, which is unrefined and minimally processed) is rich in antioxidants and fatty acids. It’s nourishing, moisturizing, and encourages collagen production in the skin. Plus, it’s great for cold, dry winters – like the ones we get here in Canada.
My Rocky Mountain Soap Co bar recommendations
I was sent three soaps for this review: Juicy Orange, a citrus-scented bar with orange juice and calendula to gently unclog oily skin; Pumpkin, an unscented soap for dry skin (this is my third or fourth bar of it); and Lemongrass, an astringent soap that uses rosemary to help balance oily skin.
My skin is decidedly not oily, but I’d also really like to try the brand’s Cedarwood bar – I hear its cedarwood and fir essential oils remove excess oil while deodorizing the skin, and I bet it would be a great “booster” product for your underarms. (I don’t usually smell when I sweat–thanks, mom and dad–but I do when I’m really stressed.
And man, have I been stressed.
Despite all of the gorgeous soap around me, I can’t quite get clean. My head is messy: full of more things than I should have taken, or maybe not enough. I am a web of dependencies; a series of suppositions that lead me to believe that I feel more things than I do.
This is commercialized grief: pain given value in the form of labour; being brutalized for the sake of work products. (Everything in this world is nothing more than labour: you needn’t feel guilty your greatest sin. It’s the other one that guts me.)
The Rocky Mountain Soap Company Natural Bar Soap verdict?
I really liked the original RMSC Natural Soap Bars, and I really like the reformulated shea butter ones. I don’t usually use bar soaps (they’re too drying for my crazy-dry skin), but when I do, I try to make sure they are almost always these ones. I have easily gone through a half-dozen of these bars over the past two years – and though I’ve moved back, will likely continue to do so.
Rocky Mountain Soap Co. is one of the few brands that has my undying nostalgic loyalty, and they do a great job of making natural products accessible. They’re not filled with strong perfumes or dyes (ahem, Lush), but they’re not obscenely expensive, either. (Did you know that the Skin Owl bars are $24 each? That’s insane.)
If you are secretly all bad sex puns: this soap will cleanse you.
Availability: $5.95 CAD at Rocky Mountain Soap Co. Permanent reformulation as of April 2018.
