The Best Soap Subscription Boxes for Bathtime Bliss

Best Overall: Merkaela

Key Specs

• Frequency: Quarterly
• Number of Soaps Included: 2-3
• Allergy Considerations: No
• Price: $24 to $28 per box

Why We Chose It

With its wellness focus and ethically sourced ingredients, Merkaela offers an affordable, quarterly soap subscription box that feels extremely high-end, thanks to natural ingredients and essential oils that give each soap a luxurious scent and feel.

Pros & Cons

Pros

• Eco-friendly
• Pre-pay discount offered
• Wellness focused

Cons

• Can't choose your scents

Overview

While it might be best known for its meditation and self-care fare, Merkaela’s soap offerings should definitely be on your radar too. The company’s quarterly soap subscription features three handmade soaps infused with natural herbs and essential oils. The soaps are saponified (a fancy way to say turned into soap) with organic, food-grade coconut, olive, and jojoba oils. 

You can choose to pay for your boxes individually for roughly $28 a box or pay for the full year all at once at about $24 a box. The soaps cost around $10 each individually, so either way, you’ll still save money with a subscription option. While you, unfortunately, can’t choose your soap varieties, you really can’t go wrong with any of the Merkaela scents (recent boxes have included rosemary, oatmeal lavender, and sweet orange).

If you like your soap with a side of mindfulness, Merkaela also offers additional subscription boxes that feature a selection of meditation and self-care treats. The Essential Wellness Box has three to five items that help support your meditation practice, while the Deluxe Wellness Box includes five to eight products for both wellness and meditation. The brand also emphasizes its eco-friendliness: All of the products are shipped in 100% recyclable packaging, and a portion of the profits are donated to “water infrastructure and environmental programs.”

Best for Hand Soap: Blueland

Key Specs

• Frequency: Every 3, 4, 5, or 6 months
• Number of Soaps Included: 6 refill tablets
• Allergy Considerations: List of allergens provided
• Price: $10 per delivery

Why We Chose It

In its quest to cut down on plastic waste, Blueland’s genius soap refill tablets pull double duty by making it both convenient and cheap to keep your bathroom and kitchen sink stocked with suds.  

Pros & Cons

Pros

• Biodegradable packaging
• Less than $2 per refill
• Refreshing scents

Cons

• Requires purchase of two-piece starter set

Overview

Blueland has become synonymous with the eco-friendly household and cleaning revolution thanks in part to its genius business model of reusable bottles and refillable formulas for all of its products. In the case of the foaming hand soap, that means customers purchase a 9-ounce glass pump bottle that they keep (don’t toss!), and refills come in funky solid tablets. Simply fill up your bottle with water, drop in your tablet, and watch as it fizzes and dissolves to become a liquid-to-foam soap formula. 

The subscription service is available only to those who purchase the brand’s Hand Soap Duo Starter Set: You can’t just purchase refills on a subscription basis individually without first buying the Duo. The Duo set features two glass soap bottles and pumps and six soap tablets—two each of the Iris Agave, Perrine Lemon, and Lavender Eucalyptus scents.

At checkout, you can choose if you want to have your refill tablets sent every three, four, five, or six months. Each refill will include those six tablets and will run you about $10 total. That comes out to less than $2 a refill for soap that’s gentle on hands and free of parabens, triclosan, phosphates, phthalates, and ammonia. Plus, each tablet comes in compostable packaging to keep your environmental footprint even smaller.

And, if you like that whole scenario, Blueland does the same schtick with its household cleaners. You can purchase the Cleaning Essentials Kit, which features one bottle of hand soap, plus bathroom, multi-surface, and glass and mirror spray cleaners, for around $39.

Best for Vegans: Formulary 55

Key Specs

• Frequency: Monthly
• Number of Soaps Included: 1
• Allergy Considerations: No
• Price: $96 for 6 months or $180 per year

Why We Chose It

With its vintage illustration packaging, luxurious scents, decadent shea butter formulas, and easy pre-pay subscription, Formulary 55 makes for a posh gifting option.

Pros & Cons

Pros

• Pre-paid subscriptions for easy gifting
• Beautiful packaging

Cons

• Expensive

Overview

If you don’t think soap makes for a very fancy gift, clearly you haven’t met Formulary 55. This Colorado-based brand has turned soap-making into an art form at every level. Housed in thick paper that features vintage illustrations, the soaps all use a shea butter base that has been “superfatted” to make it extra moisturizing and skin-softening. The scents themselves are complex, in a good way, smelling more like premium fragrances than simple essential oil blends.

What makes them great for gifting—besides how gorgeous they look, smell, and feel—is the subscription option. When you sign up, you pre-pay for your soap service—either roughly $96 for six months or about $180 per year, which gets you one soap per month. So when you purchase it as a gift, you don’t have to worry about canceling anything to avoid getting charged once the gift has ended.

That may seem like a hefty price tag for a bar of soap, but between the presentation and the actual quality of the formulations, not to mention the ease of the pre-pay subscription, these make for a sophisticated and unique gift that will delight any recipient.

Best for Gifting: Beekman 1802

Key Specs

• Frequency: Every 1, 2, or 3 months
• Number of Soaps Included: 1
• Allergy Considerations: Ingredients list available
• Price: $10 per 3.5-ounce bar; $60 per tote

Why We Chose It

With its clinically tested formulas, Beekman 1802’s pure goat milk soaps offer a nourishing and hydrating cleanser that’s safe for even the most sensitive skin.

Pros & Cons

Pros

• Beautiful packaging
• Wide variety of scents

Cons

• Expensive

Overview

Beekman 1802 was unofficially founded as a “goat milk” beauty brand, and its goat milk bar soaps were one of the very first products the company sold. Despite its expansion into facial skin care and the introduction of a plethora of flashier products like bubble masks and jelly cleansers, the humble bar soap has continued to be a bestseller. 

That’s because the nourishing and moisturizing formula is great for all skin types, leaving your body feeling soothed, softened, and looking more radiant. Vitamin-rich goat milk naturally has the same pH as human skin and is rich in lactic acid, a gentle exfoliator. It cleans skin without stripping it of moisture and gently helps get rid of dead surface cells that can leave you looking and feeling dull and flaky.

Beekman 1802 offers consumers a variety of ways to get their goat milk fix on the regular. You can opt for a subscription (starting at about $10 per month) that can be delivered in either 30-, 60- or 90-day intervals. Or, you can go for the brand’s Seasonal Fragrance Tote subscription, a quarterly package featuring an array of body-care goodies in a seasonal scent and housed in a specially designed handmade tote for $60. In addition to a bar of that famous soap, a recent package also included a hand cream, whipped body cream, face wipes, and a hand and body wash.