Sustainable Bath And Shower Products To Shop Now

Maison Francis Kurkdjian

Oud Satin Mood Body Oil, £85, franciskurkdjian.com

Best For Subtlety

Chapeaux off to MFK who’re considering how to up their eco game. (They already make great refillable scents.) This huile parfumante corps is better to wear to bed than PJs, and one to spray all over your birthday suit when you get out of your bath. You’ll love it for its natural oils of sweet almond (requires less water than other crops), argan, macadamia and apricot kernel. But also because it’s elegant and sophisticated —from the atomiser bottle that looks like a scent one to the shimmer that its light oil leaves on your skin, along with its subtle fragrance. You can have your bottle’s engraving personalised —choosing colour, style and maybe a planet-loving word?

Mendabath

Bath restoration, POA, mendabath.co.uk

Best For Bath Perfection

Loved by all the top interior decorators, this company restores tired baths, basins and shower trays with a colour match so great you’ll strain to discern it. Their cracking (‘scuse the pun) team will mend anything from one chip in a Clapham studio shower tray through to multiple earthquake-style fissures in claw baths in a Scottish castle. And these folk have even dispelled the signs of wear and tear on 80 vintage basins in a cruise liner. Not only is the work guaranteed for five years, it’s also a carbon neutral company and offers sustainability by saving sanitaryware from landfill. 

Wild Sage + Co

Five Soap Gifter, £17, wild-sage.co.uk

Best Gift

Should you buy these five mini soap bars in lavender and geranium, cedarwood and green clay to rosemary and tea tree as a gift? Or perhaps the Himalayan pink salts to use as a natural exfoliator or sprinkle in the bath? Or maybe their grapeseed oil with an essential oil to fit the season? Hmm, difficult. If you opt for the soaps, they smell better than anything has a right to, are great for face and body and arrive with a sprig of lavender and a little muslin bag of its dried buds. And come in a stainless-steel storage tin that can be used again and again. Just what you’d expect from Julie and Georgia, the mother and daughter who make these simple, handmade products with natural ingredients in their countryside cottage.

KENT

Bath And Shower Body Brush, £37, johnbellcroyden.co.uk

Best Body Brush

Pure bristle, pure wood, pure bliss. You’ll reenergise your skin with this British made bath and shower brush. It’s cleansing, exfoliating, refreshing, invigorating… everything you could want. It’ll also massage you and remove dead skin with its boar bristles. Bag one soon, from her late Maj’s favourite pharmacy, John Bell & Croyden, and you may soon own a collector’s item with its ‘By appointment to Her Majesty the Queen’ embossed on its beechwood handle. 

Shower Goddess

Shower Cap, £40, showergoddess.com

Best Shower Cap

It’s hard to think of this handmade duchess satin shower cap —that looks like a ruffled Regency cap —as anything less than fit for a princess (or green goddess). Go for elegant ivory satin with an oyster cream bow. Even Rapunzel would be able to fit her tresses in this. Plus, it’s fully waterproof, and made in bonny Scotland.

Ren

Atlantic Kelp & Microalgae Anti-Fatigue Bath Oil, £34, renskincare.co.uk

Best For Reinvigorating

You’ll want to get tired just to have an excuse to use this rich and invigorating bath oil. Its Microalgae oil improves skin elasticity, its Plankton Extract (bursting with Omega 6 and 9) helps moisturise you from submerged shoulders to toes, and the Atlantic Kelp nourishes you with essential minerals. It’s also in a recyclable glass bottle. And, ooh, it doesn’t even leave a greasy film on your body or your bath. Clean to skin, clean to planet, as Ren like to put it. Plus you’ll emerge from your tub de-stressed and revived.

Weleda

Arnica Muscle Soak  Bath Milk, £16-25, johnbellcroyden.co.uk

Best Value

Apart from a genie in a bottle, what could be more welcome than bottled arnica, which works its gentle touch with strains, pains and bruising? You can almost feel your aches and niggles going down the plughole when you use this ‘milk’ from ithis s reassuringly old- fashioned green glass container. Top that with the fact that it’s delightfully full of rosemary, lavender essential oils and invigorating birch leaf extract — and from a company that treats the soil as you would your skin — and it’s bye-bye tired body and spirit, and hello relief. 

Decree by Dr A J Sturnham

Scrupulous Cleanse Technical Washcloth, £12, thedecree.com

Best Flannel

This isn’t any old flannel, any more than Harry Potter is any old wizard. It’s a technical washcloth (a reusable lignette, or wipe, no less) that cleans off facial products without irritating the skin. Just dampen it, squish on your favourite cleanser and rub the (biodegradable) PVA cloth across your visage. It’ll wipe your face clean of cleansers, exfoliators and masks, leaving your skin brightened and buffed too. And scrupulously cleansed without wasting cotton wool balls. 

Rhug Estate

Wild Beauty Exfoliating Body Scrub, £45, rhugwildbeauty.com

Best Body Scrub

It’s not just the rosemary and Rhug honey, but the smell of geranium too that will send your nose twitching happily to olfactory heaven with this scrub. Then there’s the pleasure of exfoliating your body with organic sugar. Not to mention the joy of the silk-soft feeling of your organic safflower- oil suffused skin afterwards. This body scrub is up there with, oooh, bumble bees buzzing on lazy summer days, blooming wildflowers bending gently in the breeze and the joys of Victorian walled gardens. And it takes sustainability to new heights.

Bloomeffects

Royal Tulip Nectar, £64, harrods.com

Best Moisturiser

They’ve used upcycled tulip bulbs and petals for this newly launched bloom-to-face product, which comes in a Pooh-style honey pot, and looks like runny honey. Spread it on with the copper tulip spatula, allow your bath steam to aid absorption, then wear the ‘mask’ to bed. It has a slight sheen and is fragrance-free, like tulips — bar the initial, almost vinegary smell (the oniony odour of the flower bulb) that dissipates. Antioxidant and amino rich (from tulip stem cells and petal extracts), it leaves skin plump and hydrated. Plus, it’s ethically sourced and environmentally friendly. 

ilāpothecary

Ilaphothecary Magnesuium and Amethyst Deep Relax Bath Soak, £59, ilapothecary.com

Best For Soaking

This British-made product is so full of restoring amethyst (which soothes inflammation and relaxes the nerves), amber (to absorb negative energy), purifying cedarwood oil and calming benzoin oil, that it seems they’ve managed to bottle calm. Its effects are so powerful —and its fragrance so fabulously pungent —that it’s surprising it’s not illegal. You need only use one or two soup spoons of these (magnesium-rich) salts, because although it’s potent, you’ll want it to last from here to (natural and sustainable) eternity.

Iles Formula

Hair Turban Towel, £31.50, johnbellcroyden.co.uk

Best For Hair

This extra absorbent, luxuriously soft, high-performance microfibre (more eco-friendly than cotton production) towel is something to twist and secure on your head after washing your tresses. It even has elasticated sides and a button to fasten it. It will gently dry your locks super speedily and without friction, thus reducing static, frizz and breakage. Who wouldn’t want to limite less frisottis, as the French say, and also save on hair-dryer energy?

Three Spirit

Alcohol-free drinks, £24.99 per bottle, threespiritdrinks.com

Best Tipple In The Bath

Choose one (or all) of three bottles of botanical drinks for your bathtime tipple, from (the energising) Livener to (the herby) Social and ( woody) Nightcap. B Corp-certified and boasting high-grade, ethically sourced ingredients such as lion’s mane, guava leaf and valerian root, these plant-based elixirs are designed by plant scientists. They’ve maximised the drinks’ functional potency by using active plant compounds, including adaptogens (great for anti-stress and anxiety) and nootropics (memory boosting). Try a steaming hot mug of their sleep-inducing Nightcap as an alternative to a chamomile cuppa in the bath. 

Dreem Distillery

Into the Deep bath oil, £75, dreemdistillery.co.uk

Best For Sleep

This is the closest you’ll get to what seems like a natural sleeping pill transformed into a bottle of bathtime alchemy —CBD therapeutic bath oil, the finest quality broad spectrum CBD bath concentrate, to be precise. If you put half a pipette or so into your tub, you won’t manage to lie there soaking it in and inhaling the mood-altering aromatic juniper and lavender for more than 20 minutes before the angels of sleep come to beckon you to bed. Ethically sourced, pure and potent. And it calms the nervous system. What’s not to like?  

Dr. Vranjes

Leather Oud Diffuser, £68, drvranjes.co.uk

Best For Ambience In The Bath

There’s little that gladdens the heart as much as a new home fragrance from Dr. Vranjes. Now the Firenze alchemists have aced it with their brand-new Leather Oud diffuser. Bathtime (and your home spa) will never be the same again when you lie in untroubled waters with these scented sticks beside you. Think olfactory bliss with an intense blend of rose and geranium, a beating heart of oud and a sandalwood base. And sustainability and social commitment as the company’s core values.

Aesop

Nurture Bar Soap, £15, aesop.com

Best New Soap

Perfect for all skin types, especially dry, this gentle soap is the latest offering from the fabled Aēsop. With its rosemary leaf, cedar atlas and lavender stem scent,  it smells deliciously of a dowager duchess’s mahogany drawers in a grand country mansion. Great for those who have a rendezvous with life, as it says on the side of the packet. Plus it’s a certified B Corp company, embracing its responsibilities to people and the planet.

Fortnum & Mason

Garden Song Body Wash, £32, fortnumandmason.com

Best Floral Scent

Just launched and fresh out of the organic, biodynamic garden is this uplifting body wash. It’s from a sustainable range that comes in attractive recyclable packaging. (Think a refillable metal bottle in that beautiful F&M Eau de Nil hue with floral illustrations on it.)  Chokka with botanicals that are grown in the store’s Apothecary Garden in Somerset, the body wash smells serenely of geraniums, juniper, bay laurel and sweetest calendula.  It’s like having a classic English garden in your bathroom. (A garden during the summertime, of course.)