Was never able to try the Valobra version. I have some bath soap made with real Mysore sandalwood oil and the Aos sandalwood doesn’t smell anything like that. The AoS is way too synthetic smelling to as are most sandalwood products I’ve tried
To those who have tried Art of Shaving. Is there anything better?
- Thread starter murkr
- Start date
I believe AOS used real EO in all/most of their products, just not the right ones in the right proportions for the Sandalwood soap.
I dunno what soap you have but many claim to use Santalum Album oil when they mainly use FO and only a miniscule amount of the real stuff. Bath soaps from France and India are like that - read the ingredients carefully. "Parfum" or "Fragrance" is usually listed before the SA EO which is a dead giveaway.
For awhile some fragrance houses and soapmakers were using Australian Sandalwood oil but that's a different species and the smell is a bit different. IIRC it is endangered now as well so many are using other alternatives.
I do have a couple of jars of artisan made products from 10+ years ago that use real SA EO and nothing else and those smell very different from what the vast majority of people know.
I know this soap very well and have been buying it for over 20 years off and on.
Number one: it definitely has some sort of prominent FO added as the smell of the real sandwalwood in it is muted at best.
Number two: the soap does not smell as good as it used to many years ago - probably general cheapening of the product as the Indian government started to constrain the supply of SA.
As has happened with a lot of other products. The Indian government is probably doing a conservation effort of sandalwood to make sure that there’s a steady supply of SA even if it means a reduced supply of it
Yep. That soap is sold in very large mass quantities BTW.
