Is Olive Oil Soap Sold in Supermarkets?

Yes, but almost none of it is what the name suggests. Supermarket shelves in the UK, the US and across Europe carry bars labelled "olive oil soap", and two things are usually true about them: most are not soap at all in the regulatory sense, and where they are real soap, olive oil is a minor ingredient rather than the base. The FDA puts it plainly — "Today there are very few true soaps on the market. Most body cleansers, both liquid and solid, are synthetic detergent products." Traditional olive oil soap is still made, but it is a specialist purchase, and the ingredient list tells you which one you are holding in about five seconds.

Read the INCI list, not the front of the pack

Cosmetic labelling law does the work for you. Under Article 19 of Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009 — the rule that still applies in the EU and, in retained form, in the UK — ingredients must be listed "in descending order of weight of the ingredients at the time they are added to the cosmetic product". So the first name on the list is the base of the bar.

• Sodium olivate first — saponified olive oil is the main ingredient. This is what you want.
• Sodium palmate, sodium tallowate or sodium palm kernelate first — the bar is a palm or tallow soap with olive oil added far down the list, often below the fragrance.
• Sodium lauryl sulfate, sodium cocoyl isethionate, sodium C14-16 olefin sulfonate — this is a synthetic detergent bar. Under FDA's definition in 21 CFR 701.20, a product whose cleaning action comes from synthetic detergents is a cosmetic, not soap, even though the word "soap" may still appear on the label.
• A list of four names or fewer — sodium olivate, aqua, sometimes sodium chloride — is the signature of a traditional bar.

Fragrance, or "parfum", near the top of a short list is also worth noticing. It is not harmful, but it tells you the bar is doing work with scent that the oil is not doing on its own.

Why supermarkets rarely stock the real thing

This is a manufacturing problem, not a conspiracy. Olive oil is dominated by oleic acid — the International Olive Council's trade standard allows a range of 55.0 to 83.0% for olive oil — and oleic acid makes a soap that is mild and gentle but soft, slow to harden and modest in lather. Palm, tallow and coconut oils are added precisely because they fix all three of those commercial problems at once.

A bar made only from olive oil therefore comes out of the mould soft, and has to be left to cure and harden for weeks before it can be sold. That is dead time and warehouse space per bar, which is why a shelf optimised for cost and throughput ends up carrying detergent bars with a splash of olive oil in them. The trade-off is real in the other direction too: a genuine olive oil bar lathers into a low, creamy foam rather than a thick one, and it will soften if it sits in standing water. Keeping it on a draining dish between uses is the whole of the maintenance.

What we make in Milas

Milasso's handmade olive oil soap is made in Milas, Muğla, on an olive oil base by the cold process method, then left to cure for at least six weeks — the wait that the supermarket supply chain cannot absorb. It contains no fragrance, no colourant and no preservative, which is why it smells faintly of olive oil and nothing else. The same discipline runs through the oil: Memecik olives picked early and pressed the same day in our own closed, automated line. If you want to see how we test what comes out of it, read how to tell if olive oil is real, or look through the olive oil range.