I seem to have missed most of the sturm und drang about American ‘artisans’, but being an American born and raised, I have to agree with the critics for the most part - I’ve stopped using them.
Early on, there were some nice soaps. Strop Shoppe had a wonderful base though the scents were quite strong. Barrister and Mann original white tub Seville, and Cheshire were quite enjoyable. Mike’s never did much for me and the Hungarian lavender lit me up like a blowtorch - no offense to Mike, strong concentrations of Hungarian lavender do that to me though other lavenders don’t. Go figure.
I applaud the American artisans for trying new things, but most of them just aren’t for me. Poorly cured, expensive, strong and strange scents (wet campfire ashes or children’s breakfast cereal anyone? Not me.) and some can spoil or separate because of the high fat/oil content and a lack of any reasonable preservatives. None of the American artisan soaps ever, at any time, had a competent perfumer formulate scents for them, and none even come close to the 3T scents, not to mention Floris, Czech and Speake, and Penhaligons.
There’s not a single American ’artisan’ soap that I’d buy at this writing except Stirling, and only certain scents. I tried for a while, wanting to support them. There were incredible reviews, ‘they hit this one out of the park’ (a reference to American baseball, used very frequently), great expectations and the same old cr@ppy scents and watery soap, not really much difference between brands. A few years ago I boxed up many pounds of them and paid $60 US to ship them to a friend in Canada. He doesn’t speak to me anymore. Just to be equally offensive, I wouldn’t buy many 3T hard soaps either though the creams are excellent, and the scents are wonderful.
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