A 473 ml bottle of liquid hand soap from ATTITUDE's Super Leaves range, with red vine leaf extract. Vegan, EWG VERIFIED, free from parabens, sodium laureth sulfate, PEGs and synthetic fragrance.
Red vine leaf. The leaves of the red grapevine, Vitis vinifera, turn deep crimson in autumn because they are loaded with anthocyanins, alongside flavonoids such as quercetin and isoquercitrin. This is a serious plant in European herbal medicine — red vine leaf extract has a long history of use for heavy, aching legs, and the European Medicines Agency maintains a herbal monograph on it.
And here is the honest part: that evidence concerns oral extracts taken over weeks for venous problems in the legs. It says nothing whatsoever about a hand soap. In this bottle, red vine leaf is a good antioxidant-rich botanical and a lovely name; it is not a circulatory treatment, and we are not going to imply that it is.
What the soap is genuinely good at. Washing hands often without wrecking them. Frequent hand washing is the leading cause of hand dermatitis worldwide — an occupational hazard for anyone in food, healthcare, childcare or hospitality — and the cause is precisely the combination this formula avoids: harsh sulfates, synthetic fragrance, and hot water. Fragrance in particular is the single most common cause of cosmetic contact allergy, and hands are where you would notice it first.
Plain soap is the right technology. It works by disrupting the lipid membranes of microbes and loosening soil so running water carries it off. Antibacterial additives do not improve on that: the US FDA removed nineteen of them, triclosan included, from consumer hand washes in 2016 because they had not been shown to work better than ordinary soap.
Twenty seconds, covering the backs of the hands, between the fingers, the thumbs and under the nails — then dry properly. Technique matters more than the bottle.
Available at Só Verde, an organic concept store in Foz, Porto.