Salon-de-Provence has made things with its hands for a long time. The rue des Tanneurs is named for the leather workers who once used the water channel running under it. When the last tannery closed, the building sat empty until 1998, when Hélène Rouvière signed a lease and moved in a single copper vat.
She had learned the cold-process method from a saponifier in Marseille, who insisted that the only shortcut worth taking is to take none at all. That is still the rule. We do not heat the mixture to force it to set, and we do not buy in soap base and remelt it. Everything that leaves the shop was poured in this room.
For the first years Hélène worked alone, selling at the Wednesday market on the Place Morgan. Today her son Camille runs the pours and her daughter Léa keeps the shop and the wholesale orders. Three people is the right size: enough to keep one vat moving, few enough that we still know every batch by its number.
Our base is olive oil, and we are particular about it. We blend oils from two mills in the Alpilles — one near Mouriès, one near Les Baux — pressed from the Salonenque and Aglandau olives that grow on this side of the hills. The lavender is from a grower on the plateau above Sault; the clay is dug from an ochre seam in the Luberon.
No palm oil, no synthetic hardeners, no EDTA, no colour that did not come from a plant or a clay. A bar that cures properly does not need any of it. It also means our range is short and seasonal, and sometimes a soap you liked is simply not available. We think that is a fair trade.