• Sapone is a plastic-free, zero-waste 2-in-1 shampoo housed inside a functional, melt-away soap bottle made with argan oil, aloe vera, and panthenol B5.
• Founded by Paulius Buivydas as a school project, the Shark Tank-approved brand features eco-friendly marbled soap packaging and launches officially on August 11th.

Will Sapone Be the First Commercially-Viable Plastic-Free Shampoo Inside a Bottle Made of Soap?

Here’s a no-brainer: your bathroom is packed to the gills with plastic. Sitting inside your shower right now are a handful of shampoo, conditioner, and bodywash bottles, most of which are bound to spend the next 500 or so years in a landfill, unless they’re incinerated, which is also not ideal. So it stands to reason that if you built a bottle out of soap and filled it with shampoo or conditioner, you’d really be on to something because packaging that completely disappears would be a genuinely massive piece of bath-time fun-time innovation.

This happened back in 2019, when designer Jonna Breitenhuber created Soapbottle, a zero-waste soap-encased shampoo that completely eliminated those pesky polymers from the mix. However, after a successful Kickstarter campaign, the brand faced production hurdles and fulfillment delays and is still in product development.

Now, you can add another player that’s even Shark Tank-approved with Sapone. The plastic-free brand is a 2-in-1 shampoo packaged in a soap bottle. Founded by Paulius Buivydas when he was a 17-year-old student, the brand started as a school project inspired by the fact that 91% of plastic bottles aren’t recycled. Three hundred dollars and 23 prototypes later, they finally created what they believe is a salon-grade shampoo made with argan oil, aloe vera, amino acids, and panthenol B5 (not to mention it’s also sulfate- and paraben-free). 

The bottle itself is actually quite striking. With an embossed wordmark and a marbled surface, the bottle looks as high-end as any other sustainable personal care product on the market. With mostly minimal branding, it’s a beautiful object to place in the shower. What’s more, it appears to come with a corked cap (maybe start from the bottom of that bottle for the “soap” portion).

I shouldn’t have to tell you how this works, but simply open it up, pour some shampoo out, and lather up. Once you’re done, close it up, work up some suds from the soapy bottle, and voila—you’re clean.

That said, some fairly practical questions arise. For starters, there’s the slip factor, what with all those suds and a soapy bottle. According to the brand, the bar is compact and has a suitable enough grip to get your hands around. There’s also the matter of what happens when the shampoo runs out. The obvious answer is that, well, you now are the proud owner of a strange-looking bar of soap, but Sapone’s founders say that they have designed “the perfect ratio.” Both concerns have been consumer and lab-tested by the brand, but I certainly wouldn’t mind getting one in my hands for a test run.

Sapone currently has a waitlist for anyone interested in trying the plastic-free brand, and it will officially launch on August 11th.