A liquid hand soap from ATTITUDE, the Canadian household and personal-care company from Montreal, in their Super Leaves line — built around plant extracts, in this case olive leaf.
Why olive leaf rather than olive oil
The leaf, not the fruit. Olive leaf is rich in polyphenols, chiefly oleuropein, which is the compound responsible for the bitterness of an uncured olive and which functions in the plant as a defence against oxidation and microbes. It is a well-studied plant antioxidant, and it is what the Super Leaves range is built around.
What we will not tell you is that a hand soap delivers a meaningful dose of anything to your skin. Soap is on the hands for fifteen seconds and then rinsed off. What a good hand soap can do is clean without stripping, and that is the right thing to judge it on.
What matters in a hand soap
Hands are washed more often than any other part of the body, and the damage from that is cumulative. Harsh surfactants strip the skin's own lipids, and the result is the tight, dry, sometimes cracked skin that most people blame on the weather. A milder formula and lukewarm rather than hot water make more difference to that than any hand cream applied afterwards.
ATTITUDE work with plant- and mineral-derived ingredients, without parabens, phthalates, sulphate surfactants or synthetic dyes, and their formulations are vegan and not tested on animals.
Washing hands properly
The length of time matters far more than the soap. Twenty seconds of actual rubbing — backs of the hands, between the fingers, thumbs, under the nails — removes vastly more than a quick pass under the tap with any product. Lukewarm water works as well as hot and is much kinder to the skin. Dry properly: damp hands chap.