Morocco (Tallow+Steel) ★★★★☆ cade, cedar, juniper
Soaps with Morocco in their name usually smell like amber, spice, and incense, but this soap is all about wood. Cade, the main note in this soap's scent, is a fragrant type of juniper. It grows all around the Mediterranean, from Morocco to the Levant, and features in many fragrances that take their inspiration from the dense evergreen undergrowth that blankets the coastal regions. Essential oil extracted from cade is deeply resinous and very smokey, to the point that perfumers generally use it sparingly lest it overwhelm the top and middle notes. For instance, L'Occitane's Cade fragrance is in fact mostly scented with bergamot and pepper with only a few drops of cade oil giving it a wild and rich depth sans smoke.
Tallow+Steel has chosen to follow another path. In creating Morocco, Ryan has been very generous with his cade oil, and that's resulted in one of the smokiest soaps on my shelf. Only Stirling's holocaustic Texas on Fire comes close to matching it. I detect no top notes, not even any rose, which is mentioned on the label. What's there is a lot of wood, smoke, and tar. It's not an overwhelmingly attractive smell at first, but make up a lather and the scent becomes smoother and milder. If I were a lineman who spends his days hugging a creosote-coated pole, I'm sure I'd find the scent of Morocco quite familiar and even appealing.
Tallow+Steel's lather is very good and handles a tremendous amount of water. In fact, without a good drenching, it can be stiff and sticky, so open the tap and fill your brush when you build your lather.
Soaps with Morocco in their name usually smell like amber, spice, and incense, but this soap is all about wood. Cade, the main note in this soap's scent, is a fragrant type of juniper. It grows all around the Mediterranean, from Morocco to the Levant, and features in many fragrances that take their inspiration from the dense evergreen undergrowth that blankets the coastal regions. Essential oil extracted from cade is deeply resinous and very smokey, to the point that perfumers generally use it sparingly lest it overwhelm the top and middle notes. For instance, L'Occitane's Cade fragrance is in fact mostly scented with bergamot and pepper with only a few drops of cade oil giving it a wild and rich depth sans smoke.
Tallow+Steel has chosen to follow another path. In creating Morocco, Ryan has been very generous with his cade oil, and that's resulted in one of the smokiest soaps on my shelf. Only Stirling's holocaustic Texas on Fire comes close to matching it. I detect no top notes, not even any rose, which is mentioned on the label. What's there is a lot of wood, smoke, and tar. It's not an overwhelmingly attractive smell at first, but make up a lather and the scent becomes smoother and milder. If I were a lineman who spends his days hugging a creosote-coated pole, I'm sure I'd find the scent of Morocco quite familiar and even appealing.
Tallow+Steel's lather is very good and handles a tremendous amount of water. In fact, without a good drenching, it can be stiff and sticky, so open the tap and fill your brush when you build your lather.
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