What Is Aleppo Soap? A Complete Guide

Aleppo soap is a hard, hot-processed bar soap made from three ingredients: cold-pressed olive oil, laurel berry oil, and lye traditionally produced from the ash of the saltwort plant. It originates in Aleppo, in northern Syria, where it has been made by the same method for at least a thousand years and probably far longer. It is known in Arabic as صابون حلب — sabon halab, or halab soap — in French as savon d'Alep, and colloquially as laurel soap or ghar soap, after the Arabic word for laurel. It is widely regarded as the oldest hard soap recipe still in continuous production anywhere in the world.

That is the short answer. What follows is everything a person actually wants to know once they have read it: what is in the bar, what the laurel percentage on the label means, how it is made, why it is cured for so long, what it does to skin and hair, how to tell an authentic bar from a supermarket imitation, and how to use one without wasting half of it down the drain.

What is in Aleppo soap

An authentic Aleppo bar has a three-line ingredient list. Olive oil forms the base and typically makes up 60 to 95 percent of the fat content. Laurel berry oil — pressed from the fruit of Laurus nobilis, the bay laurel — makes up the remainder and is the ingredient that distinguishes Aleppo soap from every other olive-oil soap on earth. Sodium hydroxide (lye), historically produced by burning saltwort and leaching the ash, is the alkali that turns those oils into soap. Water completes the reaction.

There is no fourth ingredient. No palm oil, no synthetic fragrance, no colourant, no titanium dioxide whitener, no glycerin added back after the fact (it is never removed in the first place), no preservative, no sodium lauryl sulfate or any other detergent surfactant, no EDTA, no chelating agents, no hardeners. If a bar sold as Aleppo soap lists any of those, it is a scented approximation rather than the real thing.

One point worth clearing up, because it is the most common objection: lye is present during manufacture, not in the finished bar. Saponification consumes it entirely. Every genuine bar soap in existence — including the ones marketed as lye-free — was either made with an alkali or is not soap at all but a synthetic detergent bar.

What the laurel oil percentage means

Bars are graded by their laurel berry oil content, and the number on the label is the single most useful thing on the package. Laurel oil is roughly ten to twenty times more expensive than olive oil, so the percentage sets both the price and the character of the bar.

A 5 to 12 percent bar is the everyday grade: mild, mostly olive, faintly green in scent, well suited to daily body washing and to children. A 16 to 25 percent bar is the middle ground most people settle on — noticeably more herbal and resinous, meaningfully better on problem skin, and the range our own bar sits in at 20 percent. Above 30 percent, and certainly at 40 percent, the bar becomes markedly medicinal in smell and is usually bought for a specific condition rather than for general washing. Higher is not automatically better. The old makers regarded anything much past a quarter laurel as showing off.

How Aleppo soap is made

The oils are heated in a large copper cauldron set over a wood fire in the workshop floor. Lye solution is added slowly while a soapmaker stirs with a wooden paddle as tall as he is. The mixture cooks at a low simmer for about three days — hot process, not cold process, which is why the reaction completes fully and no free alkali survives it. The laurel berry oil goes in at the end, once the paste has stopped biting.

The finished paste is poured onto a stone floor lined with waxed paper, where it sets overnight into a slab about twelve centimetres thick and the colour of pale jade. In the morning it is scored by hand into cubes, and each cube is stamped with the maker's seal using a wooden mallet. Then the bars are stacked on edge in herringbone towers and left to cure. A fuller account of the whole sequence is in our note on how Aleppo soap is made.

Why the cure matters

Curing is not storage. Over months in dry, cool air, water evaporates out of the bar, the soap hardens and densifies, and the surface slowly oxidises. That oxidation is what produces the bar's signature look: a sandstone-gold exterior over an interior that stays deep olive green. Cut an authentic cured bar in half and you will see both colours at once.

The traditional minimum is six months. Ours is cured for two years in stone caves outside the city. The practical consequences are simple — a longer-cured bar is harder, lasts substantially longer in the shower, lathers more creamily, and is gentler, because the saponification reaction has had every opportunity to finish. A bright green bar with no gold on it at all has almost certainly not been cured; it may also have been dyed.

What Aleppo soap does for skin

The reason Aleppo soap has the reputation it has among people with difficult skin comes down to what the bar leaves behind rather than what it strips away. Olive oil is high in oleic acid and carries naturally occurring vitamins A, D, E, and K, none of which are removed in this process. The glycerin generated during saponification stays in the bar instead of being extracted and sold on, as it is in most commercial soap manufacture. Laurel berry oil contributes antibacterial and antifungal activity and helps regulate sebum production.

In practice that means it is commonly used by people with dry skin, sensitive skin, eczema, psoriasis, and rosacea, and by people whose skin reacts to fragrance. It works well on the face, where its lack of fragrance matters most. It is effective against body odour precisely because it addresses bacteria without needing a perfume to mask anything. It can be used as a shampoo bar, particularly on oily scalps, where the laurel oil interrupts the wash-daily-produce-more-oil cycle.

What it does not do: it does not bleach or brighten skin, whatever a marketplace listing claims, and any claim of a medical cure should be read as marketing. It is soap — very good soap, made honestly — not a pharmaceutical.

How to spot an authentic bar

Five checks, in order of reliability. First, cut or look at the edge: gold outside, green inside. A bar that is uniformly green throughout is uncured or coloured; a bar that is uniformly beige throughout is probably not laurel soap. Second, read the ingredient list — three or four entries, no more. Third, look for the maker's stamp, usually pressed into one face in Arabic script; industrial bars are extruded and smooth. Fourth, the smell should be earthy, faintly bitter, vaguely like a forest floor. If it smells like perfume, there is perfume in it. Fifth, consider the price. Laurel berry oil is expensive and two years of cure is two years of tied-up inventory; a genuinely aged 20 percent bar cannot be produced at supermarket prices.

How to use and store it

Wet the bar, work up a lather in your hands or directly on skin, and rinse. The lather is low and creamy rather than foamy — that is correct, and it is what soap without added surfactants looks like. First-time users often report their skin feeling slightly tight straight out of the shower; wait fifteen minutes before judging it.

Storage does more for bar life than anything else. Keep it on a slatted dish out of the direct shower spray so it can dry fully between uses, and never leave it sitting in water. Stored properly, a 5-ounce bar lasts roughly eight to ten weeks of daily use for one person — longer than most people expect, because a two-year cure makes a genuinely dense bar. An unused bar keeps for years and improves as it ages.

Where Aleppo soap comes from today

The Syrian civil war largely destroyed the old soap quarter of Aleppo, and many soapmaking families relocated to southern Turkey, Lebanon, and elsewhere, taking the recipe and often the cauldrons with them. That is why a great deal of genuine Aleppo soap is now made outside Aleppo itself. What makes a bar authentic is the method, the ingredient list, and the cure, not the postcode — but it is a fair question to ask any seller, and a seller who cannot answer it is a seller who does not know their own supply chain.

Our own bar comes from a family workshop that has run the same cauldron for seven generations. We wrote down the visit in the field dispatch from Aleppo, if you would like to see where it starts.

— Filed from the workshop