Can we make solid products cool again? Not just sustainable, but also desirable

For a while, it seemed like solid products were the future of the beauty routine. At one point, everything became solid: shampoo, conditioner, cleansers, deodorants. Then we got a little distracted and somehow forgot about the humble soap bar. Maybe it’s time to start looking at our beauty routine from a slightly more sustainable perspective again.

Can we make solid beauty products cool again?

The truth is, they were never really taken seriously

In reality, solid products never really disappeared. The problem is that they never became the future-forward solution they seemed to promise. According to Mintel, the format remains interesting for the beauty market, but it still carries a very specific image: the soap bar, the shampoo bar, the natural, slightly no-frills product , and, if I may say so, almost something that doesn’t feel "high-performance". And that’s perhaps exactly the point. While skincare has spent the past few years doing everything it can to make every product more desirable, from packaging to textures, solid products have remained tied mostly to their function and the promise of being more sustainable. And yet the format still has plenty to offer. Mintel suggests, quite simply, that we should stop thinking of solid products only as a more sustainable version of something we would normally buy in liquid form. The format can be interesting for what it is: it can come in different shapes, have distinctive textures and, on a purely aesthetic level, even look beautiful, as well as offering a more enjoyable and long-lasting way to use a product. In short, it doesn’t have to be just a soap bar that happens not to use plastic, but a beauty product we actually want to buy because we like it and because it works.

A solid routine

The interesting thing is that, in reality, we don’t need to completely reinvent the beauty routine. Some products are genuinely more difficult or impractical to create in solid form, while others have already found a format that works pretty well. The most obvious example is shampoo and conditioner, but it’s now also easy to find facial cleansers, cleansing balms, creams and treatments in solid form. The advantage isn’t just about getting rid of the bottle, and therefore reducing the materials involved, but also practicality: a solid product can be smaller and easier to carry around. And then, in a beauty world that’s becoming increasingly clean, minimal and almost clinical, filled with white, transparent and label-free packaging, a little bar inside a small metal container can suddenly look much more "aesthetic". If now isn’t the time to make a soap bar cool again, then when?