Best and worst of hotel soaps/shampoos
 

A completely frivolous post, but... I tend to accumulate hotel soaps and shampoos while traveling. We use some to stock the guest bath, which may sound chintzy but gives the guest a new bar of soap and their "own" shampoo. Even common hotels in the US seem to be offering high-end (or supposedly high-end) soaps. Do you have any favorites, or anecdotes or stories about hotel soaps or shampoos?

Well, first there was my boss who stayed at the Hotel du Crillon a few years ago. I asked her to bring back any soaps, etc she didn't want. On Monday morning, I was presented with an armload of Annick Goutal Eau d'Hadrien soaps, shampoos, etc. Wonderful! Then there was my trip to Singapore this past March where I stayed at the Inter Continental. To my delight, there was plenty of Bulgari Green Tea toiletries on offer. Unfortunately, my boyfriend also took a shine to them. So, we split them: shower gel/lotion for me and shampoo/conditioner for him. I have really long hair so it would have been silly for me to keep the shampoo as I would have used the little bottle just for one shower!! As a treat for him, I recently bought a full size bottle of the shampoo. But shhhhhh, it cost me £20. When he asked, I told him it cost me £5!!

It's a good day for frivolous! Current "best": The Tub, a Scottish Fine Soap. Location: Apex International, Grassmarket, Edinburgh. Bar Soap plus 2 different types of body wash and 1 yellow rubber ducky!

Agree with Ally/Pally on the Bulgari toiletries. We got them at the Il Pelicano on the coast just north of Rome. Beautiful fregrance, relaxing, elegant. I bought some of the green tea soaking bags that color and perfume the bathwater. At $40 US for I think 4 bags, I've been holding onto them as if I were planning to be buried with them.

Yes, we collect soaps/shampoos/bath gels/conditioners. My husband belongs to a service club here in the USA and they have a program that donates all of the above to an organization which gives them to the homeless.

I liked what we were given at the Movenpick Petra Resort hotel - and it has a superb location _right_ at the entrance to the ancient city of Petra too. The regular toiletries were standard stuff but there was also a sweet and colourful silk drawstring bag containing dead sea salt bath crystals along with a tube of dead sea mud face mask. Got same on second morning too, though I don't know if that was because I was polite to the guy cleaning our rooms as we passed him in the corridor because others travelling with us only got one set of the special stuff.

Mostly I don't pay much attention to what brand the toiletries are, as long as I have a showercap and some shampoo or gel to use as bubble bath. But then I'm not into branded toiletries at home either.

I did like the perfume of the soap at Le Mas d'Artigny near St Paul de Vence a few years ago but no others spring to mind.

JMY, LOL at the image of you being buried with your tea bags!! I, too, am still hanging on to mine. I'm sure I'll die before I use them. What are we like?

PS I do same as Bitter and provide a collection of a few hotel toiletries for guests who come to visit but I tend only to bother taking such things home from hotels occasionally when the scent strikes me as particularly nice, or the bottles are pretty, or for the soaps, if they come in mini plastic soap boxes.

My neice in particular loves hotel toiletries so if I ever amass too many I have her take a bag away with her when she visits.

The Rosemary/lavender bath oil and salts
at the Bastide de Moustiers.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who collects the little soaps, some of them are wonderful. The funniest thing is flying for 10 hours from London to Memphis, Tennessee to find 'imported London soaps' in the room. DOH!!! Oh well. They were lovely and I brought them back home anyway. Just checked the name - Gilchrist and Soames (sounds oh so British - never seen the soap here though ironically!) The sea Kelp bar is fab. :)

While in Sorrento I decided to try to the hotel shampoo, after 2 seconds, the smell was so bad I rinsed it off and used my own. I was later on the bus to Caserta/Casino (hot and very crowded) and a lady sat next to me. I thought to myself, gee her perfume is really awful, so strong. I could hardly wait until she got off. When she did, I could still smell that horrid perfume, at which point I realized, it was me!! It was that shampoo!! Took two more shampoos to get rid of that odor. Moral - always smell it before you use it.

At the Grosvenor House in London, I was introduced to Molton Brown products!
The hand cream alone was worth the stay!

Actually not in Europe but at the Givenchy Spa in Palms Springs wonderful products that included several samples of French shampoos.
Merv Griffin owns this property, as I was telling my kids when we drove up and of course they said "who is Merv Griffin at that point he was arriving in the car in front of us. Funny!

I went to a conference a couple of years ago in Aurora, Colorado. The Radisson was the conference hotel.

Wanted to take a quick shower before heading to registration. So I grabbed the soap, some sort of oatmeal variety, and proceeded to scrub away. OUCH! After a few swipes in a sensitive area, I realized that it felt as if there were iron filings in the stuff.

Turns out it was some sort of exfoliant stuff and really did mess up some rather tender skin. And that's the only soap they had. I bought some Dove that evening.

When I took a close look at that oatmeal soap, it did look like it had whiskers or iron filings embedded.

This is the hotel soap story that I like (supposedly a true story): (or how to end up with 54 bars of Camay soap in your room)

http://www.clean-funny.com/Hilarious...saga-maid.html

Oops - I've now looked up the source of the soap story and it was written by Shelley Berman the humorist. It's still funny though not a true story.

http://www.shelleyberman.com/books_soaps.htm

I love the Bulgari green stuff - the George V in Paris has it. I swiped it every day (twice a day, actually, since they replaced it at turn-down). I have no pride.

I did the same thing at the Mandarin Oriental in London - they had delicious Jo Malone products. To this day, the smell of that stuff takes me back to the big marble bath in my room there.

I agree with AllyPally. Bulgari toiletries were my favorites.. The Four Seasons in Boston and the Ritz in Singapore had them (slightly larger sized ones in Singapore!) I loved the shampoo and conditioner that I bought them in New York for $34 a piece - something I probably won't ever do again!

I am so glad other people collect soaps/shampoos from hotels. When I was 24 I spent a month in Tokyo at the Imperial Hotel. I collected all the soap shampoo etc. I put it in a separate piece of luggage, which never arrived in NYC. I was mortified when I had to fill out a missing luggage report and admit in front of my coworkers that it was hotel toiletries.

I still love collecting them put only if they are really special products.

The Four Seasons in Prague supplies soaps and shampoo by L'Occitane.
The lemon verbena soap is wonderful, and it's always going to evoke Prague for me.

The Bulgari products are nice, they also have them at the Villa d'Este in Cernobbio, but my favorite is the Acca Kappa (made in Treviso) white moss products at the Sirenuse. And the St. Regis in Rome has wonderful Hermes products, and will refill them if they "disappear" everyday.

Hmmmmm..the things some folks will pay for when they've been led to believe such is "high end" never ceases to amaze.

Don't know all these high-end stuff, but among the major chains, I love the ginger-flavored shampoos at Westins.

The Hilton Sandton in J'Burg, South Africa has the BIG 10oz. bottles by Camomile. Wonderful, and I brought enough to last me for weeks. They would replace these HUGE bottles everytime (2x a day) as soon as the others mysteriously disappeared :-).

The Hilton Conrads in Asia supplies Muguet D'ogive products. Very nice plus you also get a rubber ducky in your tub and a Conrad Teddy Bear in your bed. I brought about 7 of the pairs home from my last trip together with about 20 bottles of shampoos, conditioners, soaps, lotions. The bears and duckys make a wonderful gifts to young kids.

My favorite in the toiletries line is Roger et Gallet. At one time the Relaix et Château group hotels provided Jean Patou, but alas no longer; now there's a house brand (good, but not Patou!).

Our church choir went on a retreat and we were told to be very very grateful for the reasonable rate we were getting at this lakefront resort. Our room was at the end of a long hall; we noticed cobwebs when we walked in. The soap in the bathroom literally crumbled into pieces in our hands when we opened the packages...wonder how long it had been since someone had rented that room???

Another vote for Bulgari; got those at the [ANA] Grand Hotel in Vienna. They restocked the room twice a day, so I came home with a bucketful.
Also like the Roger & Gallet products. The Sofitel chain provides those, in pretty generous sizes. We're going back for a week-end in April (hooray!), so will get some fresh supplies.
And the Allegro Hotel in Chicago--not that great a hotel--gives Aveda products, which are pretty nice.

LONDON- Penhalligons entire range was used at the Dolphin hotel (closest tube was Pimlico)

They replaced everything which we swiped and the soap smells heavenly.

My favourite so far!

The worse I've encountered are the shampoo in packets and in a soap dispenser located in the shower (it's a combination soap/shampoo dispenser)!

Last year while my daughter and I were driving in France, we shared a couple of oranges and she asked me to give her "one of those handi-wipes from the hotel". I opened it and gave it to her. She said, "Mom, This is making my hands stick to the wheel!" I had given her a shoe shine wipe by mistake! I don't collect those any more!! Mary

I love this thread! For some reason, hotel toiletries thrill me. I do feel really cheap taking them home but I CAN'T HELP MYSELF!

Cigalechanta, I can't wait to get back to Moustiers for those cute little glass bottles of bath oil.

Otherwise, I love the Annick Goutal I picked up somewhere. We were treated to Hermes products at the Prince de Galle in Paris. And, just stayed at the new Four Seasons last weekend (in Tourettes) and enjoyed l'Occitane -- which they also had at their Santa Barbara property I noticed, so it's not just for the new Provence hotel.

Ahhh, life's small pleasures ...

In our little town we have a weekly food pantry, and several people who travel a lot on business collect the hotel goodies for us.

Every few months they bring us a box full of shampoo and soap, and we just put the box on our counter.

When our clients come in to pick up their food, they just help themselves, and some of them have a really good time picking what they want!

A little off the subject, but this reminds me of a time a few years ago when the food bank which supplies our food sent us boxes and boxes of little sample-size Old Spice shaving lotion!

Every once in a while, one would break. Talk about fragrance!

Anyway, our clients loved it!

Byrd

Molton Brown toiletries offer a bar of soap with oatmeal pieces in to act as an exfoliant - very pleasant.

I must add my vote for Bvlgari toiletries too.

The "shavings" in the oatmeal soap are bits of oatmeal!! It is an exfoliant, and oatmeal can be soothing to irritated skin. We first got oatmeal soap at the Swan at Disneyworld. I loved it and found that Yardley still makes it. As long as I keep it in a baggie so that it doesn't dry out completely it's great. If you let it dry out completely it is like using soap with razor blades in it!

"...hotel toiletries thrill me...I CAN'T HELP MYSELF!"

Oh me! Oh my! Now there's something you don't hear every day. I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry! Is there an element of kink and/or fetishism involved? Yikes!

If only my own thrill-threshold could be triggered so easily. Unfortunately it usually doesn't kick-in until seeing things like the Grand Canyon at sunset, a Testarossa up close and personal, a pod of Orca whales surfacing, REM in concert...

I am interested in where to purchase the Yardley oatmeal soap that is used at the Swan hotel at Disney World. If anyone knows the exact name and fragrance, it would be appreciated.

Since I don't much care which shampoo or soap I use, I use the ones I get at home (or set out fresh sample size ones when I home exchange so my exchangers have fresh soap). If the collection gets too large, I clean out the house and donate it to a shelter, but that does not happen too often.

After all, it is all soap.

I'm also a fan of the Bulgari Green Tea; you also get them at the Four Seasons in Milan. At the Inn at the Spanish steps we were given a bottle of Bulgari fragrance as a gift from the hotel; but then, the Bulgari shop is just opposite. I also liked the Aveda toiletries at Myhotel in Chelsea, London.
A friend told me that the Burj al Arab in Dubai provides full size bottles of all sorts of lotions and shampoos, from companies like Hermes. And you are allowed to take them home.
By the way, as for nice extras, the Hilton in Cologne has an espresso machine with espresso sachets in their rooms. That's a feature I would like to see more often.