The Best Soap Subscription Boxes for Bathtime Bliss

Best Overall: Merkaela

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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

• Eco-friendly
• Pre-pay discount
• Wellness focus

Cons

• Can’t choose your scents

While it might be best known for its meditation and self-care fare, Merkaela’s soap offerings should definitely be on your radar. The company’s quarterly soap subscription features three handmade soaps infused with natural herbs and essential oils. The soaps themselves are saponified (a fancy way to say turned into soap) from 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 themselves cost around $10 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 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 puts an emphasis on being eco-friendly: 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

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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

• Biodegradable packaging
• Less than roughly $2 a refill
• Refreshing scents

Cons

• Have to buy the two-piece starter set in order to get the subscription

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 the 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, which is a bit confusing. 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 roughly $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 the bathroom, multi-surface, and glass & mirror spray cleaners for around $39.

Best for Body Soap: Lather Bath Bar

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Why We Chose It: These small-batch, hand-poured soaps have some of the most creative scents, not to mention are an absolute visual delight with their bright colors and whimsical designs.

Pros

• Handmade soaps
• Unique scents
• Come with free sample bars

Cons

• Don’t get to choose your scents

Who said soap has to be boring? Lather Bath Bar has turned cleaning up into an art form with an array of colorful and imaginative bars that make you smile every time you hop in the shower. From High Tide, a citrus and aquatic blend designed to look like an ocean wave cresting over the sand, to the flower petal-bedecked Gardenia, there are soaps to please every scent preference.

Each soap is made from a base of saponified olive, coconut, and responsibly sourced palm oil and a mix of fragrance, while many also contain skin-scrubbing ingredients like salt or ground seeds to add an exfoliating effect for your body.

When you sign up for the monthly box, you can choose upfront to have it for three, six, or 12 months. You can also decide if you’d like it to contain one or two soaps, or two soaps and a full-size Bath Butter (foaming and hydrating body scrub). Unfortunately, you can’t choose which specific scents you get in your box each month, however, the surprise is part of the fun with this one. Another bonus: You’ll also receive a large sample soap (roughly one-third of a normal soap bar) of a random scent with your box. If you opt for the three-item box, you’ll get two sample bars. 

One soap will set you back about $8 a month, two is roughly $15, and the three-item box is around $25. The soaps are approximately $8 each when sold individually, however, you won’t receive sample bars with those orders, so the subscription option gives you something extra, even if it doesn’t technically save you cash on the one-soap box.