Some time ago, my father and I were discussing the fact that more and more young men and women are adopting the practices of traditional wet shaving. As many of these folks are operating on limited budgets, we decided to create a new kind of soap that's easy to use and could be purchased for a low price. I told my father that I would develop the formula to his specifications. He decided that, given that many people exhibit lanolin sensitivities and that so many people still prefer tallow soaps, we should devise a simple tallow soap with superior slickness and skincare. Over the course of many months, we tested and retested until we had assembled a truly spectacular product, a soap that was easy to lather, dense, creamy, slick, and which did not exhibit the same quirks as our main lines. He chose argan oil and shea butter as the superfats to enhance the slickness and help to mitigate the drying effects of the product (it is soap, after all). We added sodium citrate to protect the lather from hard water and to aid the user in working up a dense, slick lather quickly and easily. Because my father is from New Jersey and still has a taste for 50s marketing, he originally chose the name "LathaMan," which we eventually shortened to simply "Latha." He decided that Latha would come in only one fragrance ("Hey, in the 50s, products came in one scent and that was good enough for us!"), so we chose a classic barbershop fragrance with notes of lavender, vanilla, oakmoss, carnation, geranium, heliotrope, and musk for a smooth, clean scent such as one might encounter on 1950s Madison Avenue. He also insisted that we offer an aftershave as well. Because we wanted to be able to offer the products inexpensively, we decided to go with an excellent alcohol-free base made right here in the USA. Into this we blended the now signature Latha fragrance and poured it into handy, durable squeeze bottles (also made in the USA). Thus, we at Barrister & Mann proudly present Latha, an "honestly good soap" (my father's line). I hope you enjoy shaving with it as much as we enjoyed creating it!