Black Soap

Made the traditional way: cocoa pods and plantain skins and leaves are sun-dried and roasted to ash, the ash is steeped in water to draw off the natural plant alkali, and that liquor is cooked slowly with palm oil, palm kernel oil, coconut oil, coconut butter and shea butter until it thickens into soap. It is then left to cure.

Cocoa pods, plantain skin and leaves, palm oil, palm kernel oil, coconut oil, coconut butter and shea butter. That is the entire list — no synthetic detergents, no synthetic fragrance, no preservatives, no added colour and no hardeners.

Soap forms when a fat meets an alkali: the two react and become soap and glycerin. In West African black soap the alkali is not manufactured — it is leached out of the ash of roasted cocoa pods and plantain, which is why the method predates industrial soap-making by a very long way. The reaction consumes the alkali entirely, so the finished bar holds none of it. The palm, coconut and shea fats each do a different job: palm and palm kernel give the bar its body and lather, coconut oil its cleansing character, and shea butter and coconut butter the softness that stops it stripping the skin. The glycerin stays in rather than being stripped out and sold on, which is the main reason the bar feels soft rather than squeaky.

Black soap has been made in Ghana, Nigeria and across West Africa for centuries, by hand and largely by women, and the method has changed very little. The colour comes from the roasted ash, not from any dye — and the shade varies from batch to batch, which is a sign of the real thing rather than a fault.

The colour is the ash, not a dye.