Bergamot Brush Soap, Full Bar

Made with extra virgin olive and coconut oils, our Bergamot Brush Soap cleans and conditions your best brushes. The coconut oil gives our soap its cleansing power, and the olive oil conditions and protects fibers. These bars lather easily, so you can get the color out quicker and get back to work.

We use bergamot essential oil to give this soap its signature scent. You may know bergamot from its starring role in Earl Grey tea. It's a small, Mediterranean citrus fruit, with a bright, clean smell that makes everything a little nicer. You might even look forward to washing your brushes.

How It's Made

Bergamot Brush Soap is a cold-process bar, made in our workshop in St. Louis. We do this the old-fashioned way, using lye to turn room-temperature oils into soap. This happens through a chemical process called saponification. The lye solution breaks the chemical bonds in the oils, producing the fatty acid salts that we call soap.

Because lye is caustic, this process is the most dangerous thing we do at Federal Color. It's also really fun, because the chemical reaction happens quickly and you can watch the raw ingredients transform into soap batter over the course of a few minutes. Then, we pour it into molds.

Finally, we cure the soap for a few weeks on a high shelf in the warehouse. This step reduces the soap's moisture content, makes it more gentle, and makes it easier to generate lather. We test a mini bar with our own brushes (and hands) before it's ready to ship out.