Day 46: Today's Pick — Aesop Resurrection Aromatique Hand Wash

I will say the part out loud first: $45 for hand soap is dumb. $45 for hand soap is the kind of thing that, if I read about it on the internet without context, would make me roll my eyes so hard my optic nerve twitched.

And yet — and yet — I have been buying Aesop Resurrection Aromatique hand wash for going on six years, and I am here today, on Day 46, to tell you why.

For the uninitiated: Aesop is an Australian skincare brand, founded in Melbourne in 1987, that sells well-made unisex toiletries in apothecary-style amber glass bottles with sober black-and-white labels. Their products are good. Their stores are even better — they have a way with timber and travertine and humidity that makes a chain retailer feel like a small temple. The Resurrection Aromatique hand wash is their best-known product, and the one most likely to convert you into the kind of person who has a strong opinion about hand soap.

The scent is the thing. Resurrection is a citrus-herbaceous fragrance built around bergamot, mandarin rind, and rosemary, with a small thread of cedarwood that keeps it from being too "spa." It does not smell like soap. It does not smell like a department store. It smells like a stone counter in a south-of-France farmhouse where someone has just walked in from a herb garden. You wash your hands and the room, briefly, smells like a vacation. This sounds like an exaggeration. It is not.

Here is the actual functional review portion. The wash is glycerin-rich and lathers gently, not aggressively. It does not strip your hands. It rinses cleanly. The pump on the original 500ml bottle is metered to the right amount — one push is enough — and the bottle weight, full, is the kind of weight that makes the bottle feel serious in your hand. Aesop has, in the last decade, started offering 1L refills, which is what I now buy: refill the original 500ml bottle, set the empty cardboard refill carton in your recycling, save approximately 40% per ml.

Should you buy one? I think the answer depends on the architecture of your sink and your life.

If you have guests over with any regularity — not parties, just guests — Resurrection at the kitchen sink or in the powder room is a cheat code. People will, unprompted, comment. They will sniff their wrists in the car on the way home. They will text you the next day asking what soap that was. This is, at $45, the highest dollar-per-compliment ratio in domestic supplies.

If you live alone, work from home, and your sink is a place where dishes go to be washed by you and only you — maybe skip it. Or, alternately, get a bottle for yourself anyway. There is something to be said for tiny daily luxuries that no one else will see. Washing my hands twelve times a day with something that smells genuinely good has, over six years, accumulated into a small daily mood-lifter that more than pays for itself.

A practical tip: don't bother with their "Reverence" or "Geranium Leaf" if it's your first Aesop. Resurrection is the gateway drug, and the most universally lovable. Once you have a bottle, branch out.

The hand soap industry would like you to spend $4 on a bottle of pink soap shaped like a duck. The hand soap industry has its reasons. Once a year, ignore them. Get the Aesop. Put it on the sink. Wait for the comments.

This has been Day 46. Today's pick is something to make your guests jealous.