How Aleppo Soap Is Made: The Traditional Process from Olive Oil to Cured Bar

Aleppo soap is one of the oldest soaps still made the same way it was a thousand years ago. No moulds, no machines, no synthetic hardeners. A pot, three raw materials, a pair of hands and — above all — time.

People often ask how it is made, usually because they are curious whether they could make it at home. The honest answer is that you can make an olive oil soap at home in an afternoon, but you cannot make Aleppo soap in an afternoon. The defining step of the process is not the cooking. It is the waiting.

The Three Ingredients

Authentic Aleppo soap contains only three things:

• Olive oil — the base and the bulk of the bar. It provides the gentle, moisturising cleansing that Aleppo soap is known for.
• Laurel berry oil (laurel oil, Laurus nobilis) — pressed from the berries of the bay laurel tree. It gives the soap its earthy, forest-like scent, its green core, and its distinctive character. It is also the expensive part, which is why the laurel percentage is stated on every serious bar.
• Lye and water — traditionally an alkaline solution from soda ash. It triggers saponification and is entirely consumed in the reaction. None of it remains in the finished bar.

That is the complete list. No palm oil, no fragrance, no colourant, no preservative, no hardening agents. If a label needs a second column, it is not traditional Aleppo soap.

Step by Step: How the Bar Comes to Be

1. Cooking the olive oil

Olive oil is heated in a large in-ground vat and the lye solution is added gradually. The mixture is stirred for hours — in traditional workshops, for up to three days — while saponification takes place. The oil and the alkali slowly transform into soap. During this phase the paste is thick, pale and heavy.

2. Adding the laurel oil

Laurel berry oil is added only at the very end of the cooking, once the heat is off. This is deliberate: laurel oil is delicate, and its aromatic compounds would be damaged by prolonged boiling. Stirred in late, it keeps its scent and its properties — and it turns the paste a deep olive green.

The proportion added here decides everything about the finished soap. A bar with 40% laurel oil and 60% olive oil sits at the richer end of the scale: noticeably more aromatic and more caring than an everyday 10–20% bar, while still mild enough for daily use on face, body and hair.

3. Pouring and levelling

The hot paste is poured out across a floor lined with waxed paper or plastic sheeting, then raked and levelled by hand into an even layer a few centimetres thick. It is left to cool and firm up overnight. This is why Aleppo soap has no factory-perfect edges — the whole workshop floor is the mould.

4. Hand-cutting and stamping

Once the sheet has set, workers walk across it with a traditional cutting rake, scoring it into a grid and separating the bars. Each one is then stamped by hand with the maker's mark. Because the cut is manual, weights vary naturally — our own bars come out at roughly 180 to 220 g rather than an identical 200 g every time. That variation is a sign of the method, not a flaw in it.

5. Stacking and curing — the part nobody can rush

The bars are then stacked into open lattice towers, arranged so that air can circulate around every single one. And there they stay. Months pass. Then years.

During curing, water evaporates and the bar becomes progressively harder and milder. The outside oxidises from deep green to the characteristic sandy, golden-beige crust, while the inside stays green — which is why cutting an aged bar in half is so satisfying. A young soap is soft, dissolves quickly and can feel sharp on the skin. A well-cured one is dense, lasts far longer in the shower, and feels noticeably gentler.

Six months of curing is the bare minimum. Our own soap is matured for four years before it is sold — and that patience is the single biggest difference between an ordinary bar and an exceptional one.

Why You Cannot Really Make It at Home

You can absolutely make a laurel-scented olive oil soap in a home kitchen using the cold-process method, and it will be a lovely soap. But it will not be Aleppo soap in the traditional sense, for three reasons:

• The hot-process cook. Traditional Aleppo soap is boiled for days in an enormous vat — a scale and a duration that cannot be replicated on a domestic hob.
• The laurel oil itself. Genuine cold-pressed laurel berry oil is scarce and costly. Buying enough to make a 40% bar at home is rarely cheaper than buying the finished soap.
• The years. There is no shortcut for curing. A soap you make in July will still be a young soap next July.

Handling lye also requires care and proper protective equipment, which is worth knowing before starting any soap-making project.

How to Spot a Genuine Bar

Once you know the process, quality becomes easy to read:

• Green inside, beige outside. Cut or scratch the surface. A properly aged bar reveals a green core beneath a pale crust. A bar that is green all the way through is young.
• It floats. A well-cured Aleppo soap has lost enough water to float in the bath.
• Uneven edges and a hand stamp. Perfectly identical bars suggest machine moulding.
• A three-line ingredient list. Olive oil, laurel oil, saponification agents. Nothing else.
• An earthy, slightly smoky scent — never a perfumed one.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does Aleppo soap need to cure?

At least six months, but traditional producers cure for one to four years. Longer curing means a harder, milder bar that lasts considerably longer in daily use. Our soap is aged for four years before it leaves the workshop.

What does the laurel oil percentage actually change?

It changes richness, scent and price. Low percentages (around 5–20%) give a mild, everyday soap. Higher percentages such as 40% give a more aromatic, more caring bar that many people prefer for dry or demanding skin and for washing hair. Very high percentages (up to 80%) are intense and are usually reserved for specific uses.

Is there any lye left in the finished soap?

No. Lye is a reagent, not an ingredient of the final bar: it is fully consumed during saponification, and the long curing period allows the soap to finish and stabilise completely. A properly cured Aleppo soap is skin-friendly and free of caustic residue.

Pour La Vie

There is something quietly radical about a product whose main ingredient is patience. Three raw materials, a hand-held cutter, and four years of still air — that is the entire recipe. Nothing added, nothing accelerated, nothing hidden. Pour La Vie.