Simply Solid

Mannheim · Deutschland

Florian Zeilfelder

“Feste Kosmetik ist für mich die Reduktion auf das Wesentliche. Der bestmögliche Einsatz der einzelnen Wirkstoffe, in ihrer unmittelbaren Form."”

Simply Solid is the chemist Markus Baumgärtner and the businessman Florian Zeilfelder, who have been making water-free, solid cosmetics in Mannheim since 2005, at first through their lab ideaPRO, for other brands to sell. When the industry proved too slow to get solids in front of shoppers, the two started their own label in 2020 to do it themselves, and every bar is still pressed in Mannheim.

I have three questions for you, and something in return.

Three questions.

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Simply Solid

Cool Blonde & Glossy Shampoo

Re-Color & Power Shampoo

Simply Solid Rituals · Mannheim, Deutschland

The part they decided to leave out

Simply Solid presses shampoos, conditioners, and body washes into bars, made in Mannheim without plastic or preservatives. Florian Zeilfelder and Markus Baumgärtner started the label in 2020, building on the two decades their lab had spent researching cosmetics made without water.

Most shampoo is mostly water. Pour it out and what remains is the part that actually cleans and cares, plus a bottle built to carry the rest. Simply Solid leaves the water out, and almost everything else about the product changes because of it.

Taking the water out takes the bottle with it

Once the water is gone, the plastic bottle has little left to do, so the bars ship in cardboard instead. Without water there is nothing for bacteria to grow in, so the preservatives go too, along with the silicones and the microplastics. A whole bathroom shelf shrinks to a handful of tiles at fifteen grams each.

A solid can hold what a liquid can't

There is an upside the founders care about most. With no water to keep stable, a solid can carry active ingredients that are difficult or impossible to hold in a liquid, which is where they see the real gain over a bottle. It shows in pieces like a shampoo that repigments greying hair with caffeine and a blue dye and stands in for two 200 millilitre bottles, or the travel set of five tiles in a cotton pouch that lathers and then dries. Even the holder is made of recycled ocean-bound plastic and presses onto real shower tiles without a drill.