It’s been seven years since we first wrote about status hand soap. At the time, our now–lead editor Lauren Levy identified it as Aesop: “A soap must be recognizable to be status-y,” she argued. “That’s the only way it’ll inflict that guttural ping, Oh, this person knows.” In the years since, Aesop has proliferated across countertops — to the point that the tan-and-black bottle doesn’t quite signify “cool” in the way it used to (and the once-splurgey $40-ish price tag doesn’t seem too high compared to other nice soaps on the market). And so: The time had come to find Aesop’s successor.
I set out to track down the hand soap that now gives that guttural ping — the one that in-the-know people notice at restaurants, bars, and hotels and that your most stylish friend may very likely have next to their bathroom sink. After talking to all of those kinds of people — from Lauren Santo Domingo and Katherine Lewin to Jamee Gregory, Bowen Yang, and my colleagues at the Strategist — plus doing my own sleuthing in the soap-sphere, it seems a winner has emerged: Loewe’s Tomato Leaves hand soap.
Loewe’s hand soap was first released in 2021. It’s part of a line that includes oregano, marijuana, and ivy scents — but the scent that seems to have taken hold is the tomato. One of the earliest references to the soap I heard was back in February 2024 on Las Culturistas, when co-host Matt Rogers said, “Bowen has the best-smelling hand wash I have ever encountered in certainly a friend’s dwellings, maybe even in the wild at large.” After Yang revealed the hand soap in question was from Loewe, they quickly moved on, so I was curious to hear more and reached out. “I always like when a brand goes into this new, unexpected vertical,” Yang told me. “And I was like, A soap from Loewe. How fun! I want to smell like Jonathan Anderson.” The soap is one of the newer items in Yang’s growing collection of tomato-themed paraphernalia (which includes a tomato-shaped pomodoro timer and a Flamingo Estate candle he keeps in his SNL dressing room). Like other tomato-scented things he’s smelled, he says this one brings him back to the tomato vines in his grandma’s garden, but it’s even more fragrant — “It’s pretty confidently, brazenly tomato. It does not try to cut it with anything else.”
After clocking that early Loewe soap shoutout, I started to notice it popping up more and more. It turns out that the soap has become a mainstay at buzzy restaurants, like Zimmi’s, and my colleague Matthew Schneier tipped me off to the soap’s presence at Coqodaq, the upscale fried-chicken restaurant where diners begin their meal by washing their hands at a multi-soap station. With $1,000 worth of soap at their disposal, the guests can choose between the likes of Diptyque, Byredo, Trudon, L’Objet, and Hermès, but Simon Kim, the CEO and founder of Gracious Hospitality Management, which owns Coqodaq, says Loewe’s is by far the most popular. It’s his personal favorite too. A few days later, I asked my colleagues if they’d noticed the Loewe soap as a thing. They had. New York deputy editor Alexis Swerdloff had heard about it in a group chat with an interior designer friend, Strategist writer Erin Schwartz had spotted in the wild, and my editor, Hilary Reid, had glimpsed it through Bergdorf Goodman’s holiday windows in a display on the ground floor.
The soap’s popularity had been percolating on TikTok, too. Chris Zou, a lifestyle-content creator, posted a video documenting his journey to buy it, crediting his followers and Yang as his inspirations. While he was initially skeptical about spending $80 on a single bottle of soap, a smell test was enough to change his mind: “I smelled it and then I was like, Wow, I understand. It doesn’t smell like tomato sauce. It smells like a tomato garden, like you’re opening your windows and smelling Naples, Italy.” He’s still going through his first bottle, but he told me, “I still to this day get a lot of DMs from people being like, ‘Chris, I bought the same hand soap as you.’”
As mentioned earlier, the Loewe soap will cost you about $80, which, of course, is a lot to spend on hand soap. But after becoming desensitized to Aesop’s pricing, could we really call something the next Aesop if it didn’t give us a jolt of sticker shock? (Having an oft-mispronounced name might help too.) You’ll find a few other, less status-y but still tomato-scented options out there, including a $5 bottle from Mrs. Meyer’s. But as with all status soaps, half of what you’re paying for is the look of the bottle on your counter, and it is true that Loewe’s looks especially nice.
The runners-up
We first wrote about Mater and its all-natural, organic soap back in 2021, when Strategist writer Liza Corsillo spotted it at a “slew of cool Brooklyn shops like Lolo, Salter House, and Sounds.” In the years since, its Arbor hand soap — a blend of sage, rosemary, and fir that chefs described as culinary-adjacent — has begun a stealthy takeover of the bathrooms in some of the city’s most in-demand restaurants, including the Four Horsemen, Tatiana, and Bridges. Compared to the Loewe, this one is more of an IYKYK scenario: Tatiana received samples of the soap through “a friend of a friend,” according to VIP and events manager Siria Alvarez. For Nicholas Padilla, chef and owner of El Pingüino, it was the Four Horsemen’s general manager Amanda McMillan, an old friend of Mater founder Addison Walz, who put him on to the soap. No matter how they learned about the soap, though, everyone I chatted with loves it. McMillan, who’s in the process of working on the Four Horsemen’s next project at 284 Grand Street, is even considering bringing Mater into the new space.
Lewin, the owner of Big Night, found out about Flamingo Estate much like everyone at the Strategist: “It was suddenly, at least in my corners of the internet, rather inescapable,” she told me. The brand has since moved from the many corners of the internet to the many corners of Manhattan. You’ll find its tomato-scented hand soap at Quarters in Tribeca, C.O. Bigelow in the West Village, and Jane Cookshop in the East Village. Like Loewe’s hand soap, this one smells of the vine rather than the tomato itself. “It really smells like if you just stick your nose in a thing of tomatoes at the farmers’ market,” says Lewin, who reports that folks come into Big Night specifically looking for the soap.
The up-and-comers
Coqodaq’s Kim might have access to the likes of Loewe and Hermès at work, but at home, he washes his hands with Commune’s grapefruit-and-lemongrass-scented hand soap. Unlike many of the other soaps on this list, Commune’s soap is plastic-free, meaning it comes in a reusable aluminum bottle with a metal pump that resembles a water spout. “You gotta pump like three times and then it comes out,” Kim says. “[It’s] a little more permanent feeling than the plastic pump.” While you’ll have to pay a little more upfront for the soap in the reusable bottle, refills are slightly cheaper.
Lauren Santo Domingo, co-founder of Moda Operandi and an artistic director at Tiffany & Co. uses this soap — which smells of rose and sandalwood — at home. (Although when entertaining, she says she puts out a “gorgeous, brand new bar” of Bienaimé’s La Vie En Fleurs soap, which tends to last a little longer than a liquid soap.)
Since Perfumer H launched its own hand soap last September, we’ve heard rumblings about it in the scent-enthusiast world — first and foremost from Jody Quon, the photography director at New York, whose husband happens to work for Tocca Perfumes. Much like the beloved Aesop Resurrection, this hand soap is citrus forward with notes of cedar — plus a couple twists, like basil and angelica seed, from perfume- and scent-maker Lyn Harris, whose innovative scents have long turned heads in the fragrance world. The soap is usually around the same price point as the Loewe, but you can pay a few hundred dollars extra to buy it in a handblown glass bottle with a brass screw fitting.
Just like the sliding scale of price, there’s a sliding scale of scent, and Takamichi’s Shabondama Bubble Guard soap sits at the very end in no-scent’s-land (and at a relatively low price). It’s the scent that Claud and Penny owner Chase Sinzer keeps stocked in the bathroom at Penny’s. “When you’re running a fish restaurant, the two words that everybody wants are fresh and clean.” Takamichi’s scent — or lack thereof — is certainly fresh and clean, but the bottle is anything but. With its bold, blue graphics and Japanese lettering, the soap is a refreshing alternative in a world full of sleek soap bottles. (And for the curious: He uses Kiehl’s grapefruit-scented soap in the Claud bathroom.)
Still going strong
After talking to 33 people for this story, I’ve concluded that Malin + Goetz is the only brand that has come close to achieving the same level of ubiquity as Aesop. In the boutique-hotel world, it was the brand I spotted the most — by far. From the Catskills’ Shandaken Inn to the North Fork’s Sound View Greenport to Manhattan’s Kimpton Hotel Eventi, the soap and its decidedly cheerful, full-size bottles have taken hold.
In May 2024, there was some drama at Equinox: The locker-room soaps were changed from Kiehl’s to Grown Alchemist. Gym members were initially skeptical, according to a once-active Reddit thread titled “Whoop there it is. Grown Alchemist kicking out Kiehls.” Equinox isn’t the only place the brand, which has been around since 2008, has popped up. It’s now used at the Roundtree Amagansett and Gansevoort Meatpacking. The soap, with its vaguely earth-toned bottle and unassuming black pump, looks noticeably similar to Aesop. It just so happens that it’s Australian, too.
Back in 2018, Levy gave Compagnie de Provence one-to-six odds of becoming the next Aesop. Eight years later, the brand hasn’t quite reached that level of prestige, but it’s certainly still going strong, having earned a place on Coqodaq’s sink alongside Loewe and Hermès. In fact, at Kim’s other restaurant, COTE, Compagnie de Provence is the one and only soap he places in the bathrooms. While writer and philanthropist Jamee Gregory has been using the soap since she discovered it in Provence 40 years ago, it has also made a home for itself on the sinks of Lesley Arfin and Hilary Reid, among others.
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