I have used this soap for a few years and it makes my skin feel winderuk
Nablus olive oil soap | صابون نابلسي
100% olive oil soap made traditionally since the 10th century
Heritage Soap Craft
The first bathing soap in the world --- invented ca. 950 A.D. --- pure olive oil soap from Nablus is renowned for its ability to clean almost anything without harming it and for its skin healing properties.
Nablus soap is the standardbearer of a soap tradition dating back 4,500 years to ancient Syria and Iraq: a slow-cooked kettle-fired pure olive oil soap. Europeans adapted the Nablus soap recipe in France and Spain after discovering it during the Crusades of the 1100s, producing Marseille and Castile soaps.
Nablus soap is the higher-quality precursor to those better-known descendants, and the only one that never lost touch with its ingredient sources, production processes, labor guilds, quality standards, and relationships to its heritage.
Nablus Soap
We carry soap from all the Nabulsi soap manufacturers in order to share profit across the entire Palestinian industry. All these are produced by the traditional long-fired process.
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Nablus Soap Box
Vendor:Regular price From $30.00 USDRegular priceUnit price / per -
The Olive (al-Zaytoon; الزيتون)
Vendor:Regular price $5.00 USDRegular priceUnit price / per -
The Two Keys (al-Mufftahein; المفتاحين)
Vendor:Regular price $3.50 USDRegular priceUnit price / per -
The Almond (al-Lauwz; اللوز)
Vendor:Regular price $6.00 USDRegular priceUnit price / per -
The Tiger (al-Nimr; النمر)
Vendor:Regular price $6.00 USDRegular priceUnit price / per -
The Ostrich (al-Na'amah; النعامة)
Vendor:Regular price $6.00 USDRegular priceUnit price / per -
The Camel (al-Jamal; الجمل)
Vendor:Regular price $3.50 USDRegular priceUnit price / per -
The Land (al-Ard; الأرض)
Vendor:Regular price $6.00 USDRegular priceUnit price / per
The Camel (al-Jamal) Six Block Box
Palestinian Loofah Mitt
Marseille Olive Soap 1 kg
How It's Made
Nablus soap is made from olive oil, water, and lye. Traditionally, the mix is soaked and cooked slowly in a cauldron through a hot process until it converts to soap and no lye remains. It is then cooled on a stone floor and cured in chimney-shaped towers for up to 8 months to create a hard, long-lasting bar.
Famously healthy for the skin, Nablus soap is often considered by those who've used it to be the best soap in the world.
Collapsible content
Ingredients
Olive oil
Water
Alkali
Salt (sodium chloride) may be added at the end if the soap chef judges that the batch needs it. The salt helps precipitate byproducts from the pure soap, but it is not always necessary or desirable.
These ingredients react in the saponification process, and the result is a bar of completely saponified olive oil (sodium olivate).
Other minor ingredients include white clay powder which is put down onto the paper that covers the floors where the soap is poured. Virtually all of this clay powder comes off the bars by the time the soap is packaged.
Another ingredient, only present on one surface of the bars and in minute quantities, is the red chalk (made of iron oxide) used to snap-line the bars into squares.
Cooking
Olive oil, water, and soda are added incrementally over the course of several days, while being allowed to soak on low heat from a fire under the cauldron. The head soap maker judges the texture and taste of the batch before calling for it to be moved and poured for measuring and cutting.
Laying, Cutting, & Drying
From the cauldron, porters carry the hot soap by buckets to be poured on a cloth-covered part of the factory floor. White clay powder is tossed onto the cloth to prevent the soap from sticking. When the soap has cooled enough, the soap is measured into cubic squares with a red chalk snapline. The cutter (the secondmost specialized role behind head soapmaker) then cuts the bars into cubes. An imprinter follows with a wooden mallet and hammers the company's logo onto each square.
Once all this is done, the bars are piled into small stacks and lifted onto a wood cart for stacking into hollow skirt-shaped towers for 4 to 6 months of drying during the spring and summer.
Wrapping
After drying, bars are wrapped in vegetable-ink-printed compostable paper and sealed shut with wheat paste. Finished bars are then packed into boxes and distributed.
Further reading
---Nablus Soap Production: The Decline of an Ancient Heritage by Véronique Bontemps from The Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question
The production of soap is a very old tradition in the Middle East: it is based primarily on the production of olive oil. At first a domestic production, the soap industry developed in urban centers: the most famous are Aleppo in Syria, Tripoli in Lebanon, and Nablus in Palestine. Throughout the Ottoman period, big families of the urban bourgeoisie acquired the main soap factories located in the city center of Nablus. In the nineteenth century, the soap industry became the dominant economic sector of the city: owning a soap factory became a symbol of wealth, prestige, and urban belonging.
Process of Making Soap
The few Nablus soap factories that have remained operational follow more or less the same manufacturing process (except for some minor changes) that was developed two centuries ago. It is a five-step process—cooking, laying, cutting, drying, and packaging—supported by four different teams of workers.
At the ground floor of the soap factory, olive oil (the main ingredient) mixed with caustic soda and water is placed in a large bowl (halla) and “cooked” for three days. (In the first half of the twentieth century, caustic soda, imported from Alexandria and Europe, replaced the qeli, a plant turned into ashes.) Under the tank, a boiler helps the process of saponification. Once the mixture is ready, the head of the team tastes the soap or crumbles it on his hand to check its texture. Then porters carry the mixture in buckets and pour it on a designated section of the first floor (mafrash), where it dries for a day before being shaped into small cubes, stamped with the brand of the soap factory, and cut by a team of three to four trained workers. A day later, the same workers pile the pieces of soap into pyramids (tananir). The soap then dries for two to three months. Another team packages the soap, wrapping it in a paper with the brand of the soap factory. These workers pack an average of 500 to 1,000 bars of soap per hour.
In the heyday of soap production in Nablus, factories were registered companies with brand names and a printed logo on the soap wrapping paper. These brands were often symbols or names of animals; examples include muftahein (the two keys), al-jamal (the camel), al-na‘ama (the ostrich), al-najma (the star), al-baqara (the cow), al-badr (the full moon), and al-assad (the lion). Slogans were added on the packaging such as al-sabun al-Nabulsi al-mumtaz (Nablus soap extra) or al-ma‘ruf (the well-known).
Decline of Soap Production in Nablus before 1948
By 1930, Nablus soap production had experienced its first important setback. Several reasons are usually given for this decline. Egypt and Syria, which were major markets for Nablus soap (especially Egypt), imposed taxes on imported soap. Nablus soap was competing with soap production in Egypt. The label “Nabulsi” attached to the soap was not protected, and as a result, counterfeiting took place. This, coupled with the rise in the price of pure olive oil after the Great Depression of 1929, contributed to raise the price of Nablus soap, making it difficult for Nablus producers to compete with other imported soaps. In addition, Jewish mechanized industry, which also succeeded to obtain customs benefits from the British Mandate, provided local competition.
This first soap crisis reveals the effects, though indirect, of Jewish immigration in the region of Nablus, hitherto relatively protected from the consequences of the Zionist colonization. In general, the absence of a sovereign state capable of controlling borders and taxes meant that Nablus soap was unprotected, while at the same time the British Mandate granted customs benefits to the Zionists traders, and Egypt and Syria were able to impose barriers to protect their local production.
After 1948, the market of historic Palestine closed; so too did the Egyptian market. The East Bank of the Jordan River (Jordan) became the main market for Nablus soap. Soap producers were gradually forced to import olive oil from Syria and Lebanon, and secondarily from Spain and Italy.
Transformation and Final Decline of the Soap Industry
In the 1950s Hamdi Kan‘an, brother-in-law of the soap producer and trader Ahmad Shaka‘a, introduced in Nablus what was called “green soap,” a soap made from jift (solid remains of first press olives, mainly kernels) oil: it was a lower quality soap used to wash the floor and do the laundry. This was a small revolution. Indeed, the exploitation of this new, much cheaper type of oil allowed less wealthy families to rent soap factories and mass-produce household soap. During the 1970s, production of this “second class” soap (which quickly took the generic name of “Kan‘an”), developed rapidly. But it also helped some soap factory workers to become small manufacturers; they rented soap factories in the old city and started to produce soap. At this time, some soap factories tried to mechanize and “develop” the Nablus soap in its form, packaging, and ingredients. Another change (a consequence of the Israeli occupation of 1967) is that all kinds of oils started to be used.
Despite the attempts by some in the soap industry to transform production and adapt to the changing circumstances, the soap industry experienced a steady regression during the second half of the twentieth century, and the first intifada marked the final decline. Small factories producing green soap were already being marginalized by the introduction of detergents and washing machines and cheaper foreign products (like Lux and Palmolive). They could not compete, nor could they afford the new taxes imposed on the soap: their lack of capital prevented them from maintaining their production. Moreover, since the first intifada, soap production became harder to maintain, because the old city was the target of Israeli attacks, and many soap factories thus closed in the 1990s.
In summary, cheaper foreign products as well as the introduction of new consumption patterns brought about the decline of the soap industry in Nablus. Of the more than thirty soap factories in the old city of Nablus, several were damaged by the Israeli invasion of 2002 and two of them completely destroyed; most of the rest have been abandoned or put to other uses. For example, the Arafat soap factory is being developed into a cultural center for children; some producers are using perfumes and mechanization to produce new soaps to keep the tradition of soap making in Nablus alive. Since 2007 only two soap factories have remained functional in Nablus, and they belong to the Tuqan and Shaka‘a families, who keep them as a heritage. These factories export the vast majority of their production to Jordan, taking advantage of long-standing relationships with the distributors on the East Bank of the river and the importance of the Palestinian population in Jordan. From there, a small part of the production is sent to Kuwait and the Gulf.
Selected Bibliography:
Bahjat, Mohammad, and Rafiq Tammimi. Wilayat Bayrut: al-qism al-janubi [The Province of Beirut: Its Southern Part]. Beirut: al-Iqbal Press, 1916.
Bontemps, Véronique. “Soap-Factories in Nablus. Palestinian Heritage (Turâth) at the Local Level.” Journal of Balkan and Near-Eastern Studies 14, no.2 (2012): 279–295.
Bontemps, Véronique. Ville et patrimoine en Palestine. Une ethnographie des savonneries de Naplouse. Paris: Karthala/IISMM, 2012.
Doumani, Beshara. Rediscovering Palestine, Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus (1700–1900). Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995.
Graham-Brown, Sarah. “The Political Economy of the Jabal Nablus, 1920–1948.” In R. Owen, ed., Studies in the Economic and Social History of Palestine in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982.
Jaussen, Antonin. Naplouse et son district. Paris: Geuthner, 1927.
Sharif, Husam. Sina‘at al-sabun al-Nabulsi [The Nabulsi Soap Industry]. Nablus: Palestinian Authority: Municipality of Nablus, 1999.
Taher, Ali Nusuh. Shajarat al-zaytun. Tarikhuha, zira'atuha, amraduha, sina‘atuha [The Olive Tree: Its History, Culture, Diseases and Production]. Jaffa, 1947.
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Let customers speak for us
from 7016 reviewsI have used this soap for a few years and it makes my skin feel winderuk
initially i didn't quite believe all the reviews, i underestimated how nice this soap is for your skin. it really doesn't dry your skin out at all and it has a lovely subtle scent to it. definitely the best soap i've used.
This bar soap is hands-down the best, most gentle for my sensitive skin. I love the clean ingredients and it being fragrance-free. You could use this every day! Still, one bar will last me a long time with frequent use. My skin is left feeling wonderfully soft and clean. Makes for wonderful gifts.
love your soap, we use it ourselves, and our customers love it too <3
Love this soap and have tried almost all of them but love the Almond version the best.
I used to break out on my back and using this soap has genuinely made such a positive difference for me. It also worked amazingly for removing stains from my white shirts.
Great soap. I will give it as a gift . And thanks for the poem as well.
Nablus Soap Box
The soap is very non-drying and lasts a long time.
Amazing stuff
Everyone has always been very helpful. Been buying soap for many batch now, and bought some of their beautiful kuffiyehs too!
Love them- can I get more for presents?
This soap is simply the best -- excellent in every way!
The Land (al-Ard; الأرض)
Nablus Soap Box
Nabulsi Kufiyas
Made by the Nablus Textile Company, one of only two kufiya factories in Palestine.
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Nablus Kufiya
Regular price $22.00 USDRegular priceUnit price / per -
Nablus Red Kufiya
Regular price $22.00 USDRegular priceUnit price / per -
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Nablus Olive Kufiya
Regular price $40.00 USDRegular priceUnit price / perSold out -
Nablus Rainbow Kufiya
Regular price $22.00 USDRegular priceUnit price / per
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Frequently Asked Questions
What's the difference between the soap brands you sell?
The differences are mainly social, having to do with which family or soap factory makes it. All the soaps are all unscented and made with refined pure olive oil (except for the almond soap we offer, which contains 7% almond and 93% olive oil).
We carry soap from many factories because we aim to support the Nablus soap industry as a whole. As a cooperative, we don't believe in privileging one of our manufacturers over another, especially in a time when continuing traditions is made more difficult physically and economically.
What's the difference between your Standard and Premium box?
Premium boxes include smaller family workshops whose limited harvests allow them to produce only once a year.
Can I use your soap on babies, children, and sensitive skin?
Yes. Because it is fragrance free and made from simple, all-natural ingredients, Nabulsi soap is suitable for young children and sensitive skin. It has been made and used by families for hundreds of years.
Does Nablus soap contain animal products?
No. Nabulsi soap is vegan and made from olive oil, and contains no animal products.
Does my purchase support Palestine?
Yes.
We carry soap from all the qualified Palestinian soap manufacturers, as well as crafts made throughout Palestine and its diaspora, always at a price that benefits the producer. Our view is that by distributing things inexpensively we allow producers and consumers to make and do more on their own. Our goal is to be able to be dependable and persist rather than being profit driven.
By distributing many factories’ soap internationally, we also spread profits across the Nabulsi soap industry as well as invest in projects that help build the Palestinian economy as people want it to be without dictating the terms of those relationships from the outside.
Can I stop by in person?
Yes, walk-ins are welcome at our Berkeley location, where we offer a larger of Palestinian grocery items and high quality home goods.
All retail and wholesale orders are accepted online, and feel free to drop in to make or pick up your order. Calling ahead is always appreciated!
Our address and open hours are:
1080 Monterey Ave
Berkeley, CA 94707
11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Mon-Sat