One bar in the pack: Aleppo soap for hiking and travel

There is one community that rediscovered Aleppo soap long before the beauty magazines did: hikers.

Their reasoning has nothing romantic about it. When you carry everything, every object has to justify its weight and its place. A bottle is heavy, it leaks inside the pack, it freezes at altitude, it doesn't pass cabin-baggage rules, and it ends up in the bin. A bar of soap does none of that. And if it can wash your body, your hair and yesterday's t-shirt, it replaces three containers on its own.

That is exactly what a genuine Aleppo soap does.

Why this soap and not another

Three very concrete reasons.

It contains nothing that causes a problem outdoors. Olive oil, laurel berry oil, water. No synthetic fragrance, no microbeads, no preservative. When you wash thirty metres from a stream — the minimum distance, always — what you use stops being a cosmetic detail.

It is hard, so it lasts. A well-cured Aleppo soap is as dense as a stone. It doesn't crumble at the bottom of a pocket, doesn't leak, doesn't break.

It is versatile by nature, without anyone having to formulate it that way. It is a complete soap: it lifts grime as readily as it cuts grease off a camping pot.

The Adventurer soap: the one we designed for this

We took that logic all the way with the Adventurer soap, an Aleppo soap enriched with organic argan oil, certified COSMOS ORGANIC and made in France (220 g).

It washes:

• the body and the face;
• the hair;
• the teeth — disconcerting the first time, but it is a soap pure enough for that;
• your clothes, by rubbing the bar straight onto the wet fabric;
• the dishes, with or without a sponge.

And it has one property you would not expect from a soap: it keeps insects away. The scent of olive oil and laurel berry has a lot to do with it.

A 220 g bar in a side pocket, and your wash bag comes down to a toothbrush.

The one habit that changes everything: drying

This is the most useful piece of advice in this article, and it comes from hikers themselves, not from us.

Never put a wet bar back into a closed case.

An Aleppo soap shut away damp goes soft, sticks, and melts within days. The same soap left to breathe hardens and lasts for weeks.

In practice:

• a drying net clipped to the outside of the pack: the lightest option, the soap dries as you walk;
• a vented soap box, which lets air circulate while protecting the bar;
• failing that, a piece of breathable cloth — never a sealed plastic bag.

Take it out in the evening. By morning it is dry.

Flying: the real argument

One hundred millilitres per container, a single one-litre transparent bag: cabin-baggage rules turn every departure into a packing exercise.

A solid soap is not a liquid. It doesn't count towards the transparent bag, it doesn't need declaring, it doesn't need decanting. For a two-week trip with cabin baggage only, replacing shower gel, shampoo and laundry detergent with a single bar frees up almost the entire allowance.

And out in the field

• Away from watercourses. Even an entirely natural soap has no business in a lake or a river. Collect water, wash at a distance, and let the ground filter and biodegrade it.
• A little goes a long way. Aleppo soap lathers less than a shower gel but cleans just as well. Abundant foam is a habit, not a measure of effectiveness.
• For laundry: wet the fabric, rub the bar straight onto the stain, work it in, rinse. A technical t-shirt dries overnight in the tent.
• In cold water, lather in your hands first, then apply: a hard bar starts more slowly in icy water.
• On hair, allow for a transition. The first few days can feel strange if you are coming from a silicone shampoo. It passes.

What it says about the rest of the year

The most interesting part is what happens afterwards. Many hikers tell us the same thing: they took a single bar out of necessity, and kept it out of choice. Once you have spent a fortnight with one bar, the ten bottles in the bathroom suddenly look less obvious.

Hiking is not a parenthesis. Sometimes it is a demonstration.

Dr Constantini is a medical doctor and the founder of Alepia. This article is intended as general information; it does not constitute medical advice.