Li’s Forecast #11

In praise of soap

Lidewij Edelkoort

Column

September 2026

Lidewij Edelkoort

is one of the world’s most beloved and influential forecasters. She writes a bi-monthly column for See All This titled The Future is Handmade, where she shares her views on a handmade future and spotlights unique handmade objects. Today: the daily ritual of a bar of soap.

Column

September 2026

Due to insane price increases, I can no longer afford to stay in luxury hotels. Those days are gone for good. And with this change a new personal dilemma has arisen. In the three- or four-star hotels where we now stay as a team, three bottles of liquid hair wash, body wash and hand wash stand threateningly waiting for me. I am expected to conform to a general idea of hygiene and forced to use these purely synthetic products.

To me, this feels like a loss of autonomy, because I love my bar of soap and have used one for years and years, not only for my body but also for my hair, which every day joins the ritual of showering with the very same piece of soap. The luxury of soap is a secret sensation between skin, hair and product, where the intimacy of touch, the slowly spreading scent and the fine layer of foam work together to create a recurring feeling of pleasure that can make the day. When this ritual is disturbed by slippery substances dispensed from plastic pump bottles, my day begins with a feeling of helplessness, even of being overpowered. Cleansing is then quite literally no longer in my own hands.

‘When this ritual is disturbed by slippery substances dispensed from plastic pump bottles, my day begins with a feeling of helplessness, even of being overpowered. Cleansing is then quite literally no longer in my own hands’

Wiser now, I have taken matters into my own hands and travel with my own soap, while searching for handmade varieties that use special ingredients and, above all, are conceived for washing hair. At last, the bar of soap has become an avant-garde product again. Soap was already used in ancient Egypt, where it was made from animal fats, olive oil and alkaline substances, and perhaps, together with donkey’s milk, helped care for Cleopatra’s famously beautiful body. In the Roman baths, bathing became a social and public ritual in which care, healing and massage with olive-oil soap took centre stage. That same pleasure in prolonged bathing is slowly returning to our hedonistic culture today, bringing the library and the bath together again.

By now, designing and composing soap has become a craft within the cosmetic economy. This is why we selected several products from the minimalist Zeeplokaal that embody this new wave of attention for soap. At See All This, we fell for the black soap and its magical appearance, a poppy-seed scrub whose name alone tells you how it will feel, and a traditional plant soap for the care of hair.

The handmade and irregular nature of these products is precisely part of their allure, and a guarantee that each piece of soap seems to have been formed especially for the person who will hold it. A considered product that can make everyday life just a little more joyful. Like a small luxury.

Fig 1. Zeeplokaal

Discover our selection of Zeeplokaal soaps in the new Art Room: maca & grapefruit hair soap, poppy-seed scrub soap and black soap with activated charcoal & tea tree.

Visit the Art Room >