Marius Fabre ⭐ Top pick

Family soapmaker founded in 1900, one of the last four around Marseille still producing real Savon de Marseille by the 1688 process. Original cauldrons, vegetable oils, no additives. EPV-certified and actively campaigning for IGP protection.

In 1900, Marius Fabre set up his cauldrons in Salon-de-Provence and began making Savon de Marseille. He followed the process codified by Colbert in 1688: ten days of cauldron cooking with only vegetable oils (olive and copra), soda, water, and salt. Nothing else. No colorants, no fragrance, no preservatives, no animal fat. The result is a pure cube with 72% oil, hot-stamped.

In Salon-de-Provence, the smell of olive oil heating in the cauldrons is part of the local landscape. Savon de Marseille is not just a product, it is a gesture. The gesture of grandmothers washing laundry by hand, and of Provençal homemakers scrubbing terracotta tiles with an olive-green block. Marius Fabre belongs to that lineage, a craft that predates industry and will outlast it.

In the 20th century, the chemical industry gradually wiped out artisanal soapmakers. Synthetic detergents were cheaper, easier to produce, more "modern." Hundreds of soap factories closed in a few decades. In Marseille, once home to more than eighty soapmakers, the collapse was total. In 2025, only four producers in the region still follow the authentic process. Marius Fabre is one of them.

Transmission sits at the center of this story. Four generations of the Fabre family have worked at the same cauldrons, the ones Marius installed in 1900. The gesture passed from father to son, then from mother to daughter. Julie and Marie Bousquet-Fabre, fourth generation, now run the company. They do more than make soap. They are leading a political fight for a Savon de Marseille IGP to protect the name against industrial counterfeits flooding the market.

That is the core problem: anyone can write "Savon de Marseille" on a package. Soaps made in Asia, loaded with additives, animal fats, and preservatives, are sold under that name in supermarkets worldwide. An IGP would reserve the name for soaps made by the authentic process in the region of origin.

The company carries the EPV label. The boutique and the Savon de Marseille museum in Salon-de-Provence welcome visitors in the historic premises, between still-active cauldrons and stacks of cubes drying in open air. Prices remain accessible: a 600-gram cube costs just a few euros. It is one of the rare truly exceptional products that is also genuinely democratic.