Grappling Soap Ingredients: We Read All 12 Labels So You Do Not Have To

Most soap sold to grapplers is ordinary saponified soap with tea tree and eucalyptus oil added near the end of the list. We went looking for the ingredient lists of twelve brands sold to BJJ, judo, wrestling and MMA athletes in Europe. Six publish a full or near-full list. Three name a handful of ingredients without a full one. One publishes nothing at all, and two we could not check because their websites are down or could not be found. Every brand whose chemistry we could determine is traditional soap, chemically the same family as a bar of Marseille soap. And not one of the twelve tells you how much tea tree oil is actually in the bar. If you have ever suspected you were paying a premium for tea tree oil in soap, the labels broadly agree with you.

In this article

• What is actually in a soap sold for grappling?
• Which brands publish their ingredients?
• The four full lists, quoted
• Why is almost every grappling soap traditional soap?
• Why does nobody print how much tea tree oil is in the bar?
• What about the medicated versions?
• How to read a soap label yourself in thirty seconds
• Where we sit, since we make soap too
• FAQ

What is actually in a soap sold for grappling?

Almost always the same five things, in the same order: a soap base made from vegetable oils, water, glycerin, something to deal with hard water, and then tea tree and eucalyptus oil.

Here is the market leader's full list, from their own ingredients page:

Sodium Palmate, Sodium Palm Kernelate, Water, Glycerin, Sodium Gluconate, Eucalyptus Globulus Leaf Oil, Melaleuca Alternifolia (Tea Tree) Leaf Oil, Palm Acid, Sodium Chloride, Palm Kernel Acid.

Ten ingredients. The first two are palm oil and palm kernel oil after they have been turned into soap. Sodium Gluconate is a water softener. Then the two oils the whole category is known for, sitting sixth and seventh.

That position matters. Ingredient lists run in descending order of weight, but only down to 1%. Below 1%, a brand can list things in any order it likes. So an oil appearing two thirds of the way down a ten item list tells you it is present in small quantities, and tells you nothing more precise than that.

Which brands publish their ingredients?

We looked at twelve brands selling soap to combat sports athletes, from the American market leader down to small British and French makers, and checked what each one publishes on its own website. The picture is patchier than you would expect from a category this confident.

Clean Hugs is in the partial row on the basis of what retailers who stock it publish, because the brand's own site has been showing a maintenance page. VA1 we could not check at all: we were unable to find the brand's own website. Several brands also do not publish the weight of the bar, which makes working out what you are paying per wash impossible.

One thing worth flagging if you buy from the UK. Scrubmission's bar, at five pounds one of the cheapest in the category, publishes its full list, and that list includes Tolnaftate (1%). Tolnaftate is a registered over the counter antifungal drug active in the United States. That is not a criticism of the product, and it is exactly the kind of thing you only find out by reading the label, which is rather the point of this article.

Worth knowing if you buy from outside the EU: the American brands list their soap the American way, as the oils that went in plus sodium hydroxide, for example "Olive Oil, Water, Coconut Oil, Sodium Hydroxide". European law wants the list to describe what comes out after the reaction, so Sodium Olivate, Sodium Cocoate. Neither is dishonest. They are different conventions, and it is one reason an American bar can look unfamiliar next to a European one.

The four full lists, quoted

These are the four brands that publish something you can actually check, reproduced as they appear on their own pages.

Defense Soap, Original Bar (United States)

Sodium Palmate, Sodium Palm Kernelate, Water, Glycerin, Sodium Gluconate, Eucalyptus Globulus Leaf Oil, Melaleuca Alternifolia (Tea Tree) Leaf Oil, Palm Acid, Sodium Chloride, Palm Kernel Acid.

HONAE, Red Volcano (France)

sodium olivate, sodium cocoate, aqua (water), glycerin, cinnamomum camphora bark oil, sulphur, papaversomniferum seed extract, butyrospermum parkii (shea) butter, sodium chloride, illite (red clay), paullinia cupana seed powder, melaleuca alternifolia leaf oil, tetrasodium glutamate diacetate, limonene.

Reproduced exactly as printed on their page, lower case and all, including the run-together "papaversomniferum" which is poppy seed extract.

Gold BJJ, Submission Soap, Classic Tea Tree (United States)

Olive Oil, Water, Coconut Oil, Sodium Hydroxide, Organic Palm Oil, Hemp Oil, Shea Butter, Eucalyptus Essential Oil, Tea Tree Essential Oil, Cajeput Essential Oil, Peppermint Leaves.

Solpri, Shield Athlete's Lemongrass & Tea Tree Bar (United States)

Saponified oils of sunflower*, safflower*, coconut*, sustainable palm*^ (with retained glycerin), essential oils of lemongrass, tea tree, orange, lime, rosemary and eucalyptus, annatto seed powder and or mineral oxide powder (for orange color). *Certified Organic ^ RSPO Certified Sustainable

Read them next to each other and the family resemblance is hard to miss. A vegetable oil soap base, glycerin, salt, and a small quantity of essential oils. HONAE is the most elaborate of the four, adding sulphur, camphor, shea butter, red clay and poppy seed, and it is the only one of the twelve that is explicitly palm free.

Why is almost every grappling soap traditional soap?

Because traditional soap is straightforward to make in small batches. You take vegetable oils, add an alkali, and the reaction produces soap and glycerin. It is the oldest recipe in personal care and it works, which is why a small brand with an idea and a niche audience tends to start there.

The chemistry has one consequence worth knowing about as a buyer. Real soap is alkaline, usually somewhere around pH 9 to 10, while your skin sits acidic at roughly 4.5 to 5.5. That gap is why soap can leave skin feeling tight, and it is also why soap reacts with the calcium in hard water to form the grey film on your shower tray. A syndet bar, which uses cleansing agents rather than saponified oils, can be made at skin pH and is far less prone to forming that film.

We have written about the difference at length, because it is the same question that comes up with shampoo bars: what is a syndet bar, and do shampoo bars work in hard water.

Of the twelve brands here, we found no syndet bar at all. Every one where the chemistry could be determined is traditional soap.

Why does nobody print how much tea tree oil is in the bar?

Because they do not have to, and because none of them have chosen to. Across all twelve brands, in three languages, we found zero published concentrations. The closest anyone comes is describing their oils as "pharmaceutical grade", which is a description of the oil rather than a quantity of it.

There is a ceiling, at least in Europe. The EU's Scientific Committee on Consumer Safety adopted its final opinion on tea tree oil on 30 October 2025, published on 14 November 2025 as SCCS/1681/25 and set out the concentrations it considers safe in cosmetics: up to 1.0% in a shower gel, up to 1.0% in a face wash, up to 2.0% in a shampoo, and up to 0.1% in a leave-on face cream, with the oil meeting the ISO 4730:2017 composition standard. The committee also classes tea tree oil as a moderate skin sensitiser, which is why the leave-on figure is so much lower.

So a bar made to be sold legally in the EU is working inside those numbers. Which of them a solid body bar falls under is a judgement its safety assessor makes. What you cannot do, as a buyer, is compare one brand against another, because none of them tell you.

What about the medicated versions?

Two of the American brands sell a second, stronger bar alongside the regular one. Defense Soap has a version containing tolnaftate at 1.0%, and Solpri has one containing clotrimazole at 1%. Both of those are registered drug actives in the United States, sold over the counter.

Neither is banned from cosmetics in the EU by name. The exclusion works through the definitions instead: a bar containing a therapeutic antifungal at treatment strength would be assessed as a medicinal product rather than a cosmetic, and would need a marketing authorisation. Which is why the medicated versions are patchy or unavailable here even where the regular bar is easy to buy.

It is worth understanding that distinction, because it explains a lot about the category. The strong versions are strong because they contain a drug. The regular versions contain essential oils, and essential oils are cosmetic ingredients.

How to read a soap label yourself in thirty seconds

You do not need to know any chemistry. Four checks will tell you most of what there is to know about any bar in this category.

1. Look at the first ingredient. It is the bulk of the bar. Everything after it is a smaller quantity than it.
2. Check whether it is soap or not. Anything reading Sodium [something]ate, such as Sodium Palmate, Sodium Cocoate or Sodium Olivate, is saponified oil, which means traditional soap. A name like Sodium Cocoyl Isethionate or Sodium Coco-Sulfate means a syndet bar instead.
3. See where the oils sit. Essential oils near the bottom of the list are present in small amounts. That is normal and, given the safety limits, unavoidable.
4. Look for palm. Sodium Palmate and Sodium Palm Kernelate are palm oil. If that matters to you, it is easy to spot, and a brand that avoids it usually says so loudly.

If label reading is new to you, we have a longer walkthrough of the terms that turn up most often: sulphate free, soap free and syndet on a label.

And one meta check. If there is no ingredient list at all on the product page, that is information too. It is not necessarily a red flag, since plenty of small makers are simply disorganised about their websites, but in a category this full of confident promises it is reasonable to want to see the label before you believe the copy.

Where we sit, since we make soap too

It would be a bit rich to publish this without showing our own hand.

Rinsed makes 3-in-1 bars for travellers and athletes, and our current bars are syndet rather than soap. Our ingredient lists are on every product page. We are also developing a bar aimed specifically at grapplers, and since this article is about transparency, here is the formula we are working with:

Sodium Cocoyl Isethionate, Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil, Aqua, Polyglyceryl-4 Laurate, Glycerin, Simmondsia Chinensis Seed Oil, Tetrasodium Glutamate Diacetate, Inulin, Aloe Barbadensis Leaf Extract, Melaleuca Alternifolia (Tea Tree) Leaf Oil, Eucalyptus Globulus Leaf Oil, French Green Clay, Sodium Benzoate, Potassium Sorbate, Citric Acid.

Yes, it has tea tree and eucalyptus in it, like everyone else's. We are not going to tell you those oils will protect you from anything, because we have no evidence for that and neither does anybody else selling you a bar. What we will tell you is what is in it, how much tea tree oil it contains once that is finalised, and what it costs per wash. That seems like the least a brand can do.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• European Commission, Scientific Committee on Consumer Safety, final opinion on tea tree oil (SCCS/1681/25), adopted 30 October 2025
• Defense Soap, ingredients
• HONAE, Red Volcano
• Gold BJJ, Submission Soap
• Solpri, Shield Athlete's bar
• Scrubmission, soap
• Mijaljica D, Spada F, Harrison IP, “Skin Cleansing without or with Compromise: Soaps and Syndets”, Molecules, 2022

Community quotes are reproduced from public threads on r/bjj, r/wrestling and r/grappling and represent the views of the people who posted them, not findings.

Alexandre, Founder @Rinsed™