By late July, the tap runs warm for a while before it turns cold, and skin holds onto the day the way a room does. So the first thing a summer morning tends to ask for is not a scent or a product but a temperature. Something cool, and clean, and easy to move on from.
Oksan Baek makes soap slowly, the way the brand has always worked. It built its name on scent, and rather than coat a bar in white jade, it grinds jade from Chuncheon right into the soap itself, so the stone is worked all the way through. What you end up with is a bar you'll want to leave out instead of tucking away, close enough to the basin to catch you as you pass.
Root Balance is the one for summer. It's pine and forest and green herbs, a little like standing among trees before the heat has fully lifted off the ground. It lathers cool and rinses clean, and it leaves the sort of quiet on your skin that a cold flannel does, only without the trouble of one. If you'd like something a touch warmer, there's Moran Rose, all floral stems and earth and wood, less about the flower than the ground it grew from.
The set adds a stone to go with the bar. It's a small gua sha cut from the same white jade, shaped like a heart, meant for the slow few minutes after you've rinsed. Jade holds its cool longer than skin does, which is really the whole point of it in summer. You draw it slowly outward across a clean face, and the morning seems to settle by half a step. Nothing to switch on, nothing to time. The stone simply does what the material has always done, holding the cool for a while and then giving it back.
Left to dry between uses, both of them last a long time. You can cut the soap into smaller pieces and keep them in a dish that drains well, and the stone only asks to be wiped and set down. It's care measured in minutes rather than steps, the smallest thing you could still fairly call a ritual.
The soap on its own is CA$28. The set, soap and stone together, is CA$45, and it ships across Canada.
A room finds its temperature over time, and a morning does too. In summer you get to set it early, there at the basin, with one cool and simple thing to start the day clean.
The Jade Soap and Gua Sha Set by Oksan, carried by Ondo.
From this story
Jade Soap and Gua Sha Set [Root Balance], pine and green herbs, the summer lead
Jade Soap and Gua Sha Set [Moran Rose], floral stems and earth, a touch warmer
Jade Soap [Root Balance], the bar on its own
The Still Shelf, the first Oksan story →
Explore the Ritual edit →
