KLAR Soap: a Family Tradition.

The Klar family from Heidelberg have been making high quality soap since around 1840 – a proud tradition, now in the fifth generation. The firm was originally founded by Philipp Klar, who travelled widely to learn the trade, in particular in St. Petersburg. The industrial age saw Philipp’s son Theobald expanding operations to cover the whole of southern Germany. He introduced new mixtures and recipes and more modern methods that enabled him significantly to increase production without sacrificing individuality or traditional quality. Much of the present Klar range of personal beauty and special-purpose soaps goes back to this early period.
In the 1970s came a further expansion, this time of the range. The most recent incumbent, Niels Klar, has been carrying on the family tradition since 2004. Well-known firms that have their soaps made by Klar today include Weleda and Helena Rubinstein.
A particular feature of Klar soaps – which goes along with their outstanding quality – is the honest simplicity of their presentation. Avoiding today’s fashionable hype, they are sold for what they are: soap in a selected range of scents, as described on the wrapper. The constituent ingredients of all Klar soaps are natural vegetable oils and caustic soda, to which salt is added after boiling. This produces a basic, pure hard soap, which can be sold as such, but which is usually further processed to make scented soap or what we like to call “functional soaps”, i.e. containing medicinal substances like natural brine, sulphur or birch tar. Soap containing sulphur is good for ‘difficult’, infection-prone skin, soap with brine (sourced from natural salt beds in Saxony) helps both dry and greasy skin types, and birch tar soap is used to clear the skin of impurities.
All Klar soaps are made in Germany. And - to come back to an earlier point – we do not advertise them as the ‘latest thing’ to hit the cosmetics market, where quality often takes second place to the ideas of PR people. On the contrary, the name Klar stands for genuine, traditional quality – just honest-to-goodness soap.