Ethique Roundup Review | Solid Shampoo, Conditioner, Lotion, Facewash, Handwash and more
The Top Line:
Ethique, as a company, is pretty great - a B-corporation with zero plastic packaging who plants trees and donates portions of their sales. Their ingredients are limited, with mostly natural and low impact on the environment.
As for their products, we like some and not others.
What we loved: We loved their Pinkalicious solid shampoo and Bliss solid face cleanser. We liked their Wonderbar solid conditioner bar and their Rustic zero waste deodorant.
What we liked less: If we’re using them at night, we don’t mind the Quench solid face and body moisturizers, but the thickness of them are just a bit much for daytime.
We also love that they have plenty of mini sizes (like here and here) as well as bundles and trial packs.
Note: check back for our review on their handwash concentrate! At first glance, it looks like it comes at a reasonable price — and zero waste!
The Breakdown:
Cost & Products: We got a few!
Deodorant in Rustic, $13
Trial Pack, for Normal Skin & Hair, $13 - which includes small samples of:
Solid Cream Body Cleanser in Sweet Orange & Vanilla (mini), $4
How ‘Clean’ Is This? No Palm oil, vegan, and cruelty-free. Onle one potentially concerning ingredient that EWG is on the lookout such as Behentrimonium Methosulfate (shampoo & conditioner). Face cleanser, body butter, have no concerning ingredients.
Packaging: Zero plastic! Ethique is 100% plastic-free packaging.
Purchasing & Shipping: We bought ours on the Ethique store. Shipping is free for orders >$45.
The slightly annoying thing on the website is that things are not sorted properly — we found two instances of shampoo and conditioner duos as well as the mini version of products hiding in other tabs.
Good to know: Ethique has an Amazon store available! The shop is a bit different from the Ethique website, though.
Also Good to know: Ethique is a B-corporation. We LOVE B-corps! 1 tree is planted for every order (hurray!) and 2% of sales are donated to charity (yay!!).
What’s Your Impact? No more plastic! Typically, with the whole kit, between Shampoo, conditioner, face wash, face lotion, and body lotion, the average person would throw away 10-25 plastic bottles per year! Additionally, the ingredients are a huge step forward in terms of eco-friendly compared to drugstore brands.
The Good:
✔ Zero plastic! Most, if not all, packaging is compostable
✔ 1 tree planted per order plus 2% of sales go to charity
✔ B-corporation!!
✔ Ingredients across the board are very limited and have pretty low impact
✔ We loved the face cleanser and shampoo ❤️
✔ We liked the deodorant and conditioner
✔ Reasonably priced across the board, especially when looking at bundles (or hair bundles)
✔ Lots of trial sizes available so makes it low commitment to try a product
The Bad:
✗ As a daily moisturizer, we didn’t like the solid face moisturizer - but don’t mind it at night
✗ Same goes with body lotion (but this is just going to be a thing with solid lotions)
✗ Not always the cheapest option, but generally reasonably priced
✗ The handwash is a bit of a labor project, which is why we haven’t tried it yet
The Experience
Context: We tried the whole Ethique experience (except for the handsoap - we will update this article when we do!). Shampoo, Conditioner, Face wash, Deodorant, Lotion, and face moisturizer. We’ve previously written about solid shampoo and conditioner brands, like HiBar, Kitsch, and byHumankind. Solid lotions that we’ve done include Kate McLeod’s Body stone and Lush.
Deodorants, man, we’ve covered a lot from Beautycounter to Habitat Botanicals to Public Goods — and even did this roundup review. For face wash, we tried Terra’s Beauty Bar from Grove, which we still love, as well as Oseque Enzyme Powder. Never tried a solid face lotion. Whew, so, here goes nothing:
We liked it a lot - suds up nicely!
Leaves hair much less parched than other shampoos.
Almost up to the quality to Kitsch or HiBar.
Scent is gentle and light.
We loved the shampoo.
Takes a bit more work to get it over strands than others, but…
Leaves hair very nice and silky after some elbow grease.
Scent here is also gentle.
We liked the conditioner.
A bit different: the deodorant is a bit more .. powdery.
Suggestion is to use lightly, and we didn’t listen the first time! Leaves a white residue if you do use it with a heavy hand!
Scent was fun - Rustic.
We like the deodorant.
So nice! We loved how gentle this cleanser was.
Does remove most of our makeup.
Light cocoa butter scent.
We love using the face cleanser!
This was a first - we didn’t know what to expect.
Very similar to solid body lotions, if we’re being honest.
Given that we don’t love the tackiness on our arms and legs, we particularly don’t like this as a daytime moisturizer.
It’s too heavy to wear during the day - we use it as a thicker night moisturizer to seal in other product.
We don’t mind using the face moisturizer at night but we do not like using it for under makeup.
Not to be confused with the Ethique Solid bodywash (which we did not try)!
Ethique outlines the difference between their cleansers as well as bodywash bars here.
TLDR: cream cleansers are not soap so they are a bit more gentle.
We liked using this bar!
Scent was very nice and gentle as well.
Unfortunately, it gets used up quickly.
A little grainy, like the other products but not any more bothersome.
A bit less greasy than some of the others we’ve tried but still.. it’s a solid lotion bar, i.e., it’s going to be a bit tacky.
We don’t mind using this solid lotion for night time.
Because this one was more involved, we haven’t fully tested to give our review. Stay tuned!
Note: these are the sample sets and minis we bought to review:
The Cost
For Ethique - we will not compare the trial sizes below. We will only include the full sized bars for the shampoo, conditioner and lotion. We do add some of the duos that you can buy on their site, which save you around 15%.
Money Report:
Whew. Alright, so.. .Ethique’s Solid Body Butter is a decent deal. Solid Shampoo is a very good deal and Conditioner Bar is just OK (the combo pack makes it a decent deal). Solid Face Cleanser looks to be on the pricy side compared to the other two solids but honestly the Terra is clay versus this is a gentle cleanser. Plastic-free Deodorant is kind of middle of the road in terms of price. Solid cream cleanser is priceyyyy. Lastly, Solid Face Moisturizer... we don’t know how to compare it to liquids because we won’t know how long it will last. That said, of the solids, it is the cheapest per ounce. A starter bundle makes it even more cost friendly.
Our Recommendation:
Ethique, as a company, is pretty great - a B-corporation with zero plastic packaging who plants trees and donates portions of their sales. Their ingredients are limited, with mostly natural and low impact on the environment.
As for their products, we like some and not others.
What we loved: We loved their Pinkalicious solid shampoo and Bliss solid face cleanser. We liked their Wonderbar solid conditioner bar and their Rustic zero waste deodorant.
What we liked less: If we’re using them at night, we don’t mind the Quench solid face and body moisturizers, but the thickness of them are just a bit much for daytime.
We also love that they have plenty of mini sizes (like here and here) as well as bundles and trial packs.
Note: check back for our review on their handwash concentrate! At first glance, it looks like it comes at a reasonable price — and zero waste!
We're on a mission to reduce our personal carbon footprint with small, hopefully easy, changes in our home to fight against climate change. This means we're looking for products that may be all natural, ideally zero waste, reusable or compostable -- while still being affordable!