Lux Bar Soap by Unilever

I grew up using bar soaps for my daily baths. There weren't any shower gels or creams available in supermarkets in the Philippines while I was growing up, so I am accustomed to using the bar type of soap. Behold my surprise when I was browsing the supermarket aisles in Hong Kong, and couldn't find a single soap bar.  Here in Manila we now have so many choices of bar, liquid, cream, gel washes from local and foreign brands. I've been using Lervia Milk Soap for a long time, but I chanced upon these soaps by Lux, a brand I have had good experiences with. 

Lux soaps come in three variants: Velvet Touch and Soft Touch for their softening and smoothing functions; Wake Me Up for freshening. I personally do not buy these claims but I was curious whether these would clean properly without drying out my skin, which is what I try to look for with body soaps. It's small at 85g so I got all three kinds to try.

I wasn't able to take pictures of the unpacked soaps, but to illustrate, they have chiseled corners and lovely marbelized strips of color for the Soft Touch (pink) and Wake Me Up (blue).

It's interesting to note that Unilever wrote different descriptions for the blue bar and the white and pink ones. The Wake Me Up bar is to make one "feel recharged and refreshed." While the Velvet Touch and Soft Touch "reveal caressable soft & smooth skin." These little things really do matter to me : )

Lux Wake Me Up, which happens to be my favorite of the three, claims to have icy mineral salts and seaweed infused into the bar. I prefer this blue bar because it leaves my skin softer and more moisturized compared to the Velvet Touch and Soft Touch. Between the white and pink bar, I would choose the pink bar because it is less drying. The white bar is the least moisturizing of the three, but still provides more moisture than Lervia, which I was pretty happy with before discovering the Lux range. They all clean very well though.

Both Soft Touch and Velvet Touch contain oils from apricot kernels, sweet cherries, and grape seeds. They share all other ingredients except for lauric acid, methylchloroisothiazolinone, methylisothiazolinone, and CI 12490 which are present in Soft Touch (pink) only; disodium distyrulbiphenyl disulfonate is in Velvet Touch (white) only. 

They say the simpler the ingredient list of a product, the more cosmetically elegant and friendlier to sensitive skins it is. Wake Me Up indeed sports a shorter ingredient list than Soft Touch and Velvet Touch. I spy fucus vesiculosus, a seaweed that is also known in the name of bladderwrack. So it's true that the blue bar has seaweed infused; I'm just not sure about the icy minerals. I guess this bar delivers better results (softer skin) because it does not contain as many chemicals as the first two.

These bar soaps are very affordable at P17.85 each. I really enjoy using these in the bath especially the pink and blue ones. These are worth checking out if you are fond of bar soaps. A tidbit: it's sold for P2 more in the department store in Landmark Makati than its supermarket, which is only one floor below. If you don't mind the small effort of walking a few more steps, you can save some loose change.