“He saw people in World War II fighting over these divisions between them,” says his granddaughter Lisa Bronner, who now runs a blog for the company, in a phone interview. (He claimed the treatment was responsible for the blindness he developed later in life.) Bronner, as he now called himself, began preaching a message about uniting the human race - so passionately, in fact, that he was committed to an Illinois insane asylum in the ’40s and subjected to electric shock therapy. Born in Germany to a Jewish soapmaking family in 1908, Heilbronner moved to the United States in his early 20s, where he adopted the title “doctor,” perhaps as a mistranslation for the German soapmaking accreditation "master.” After Hitler rose to power in his homeland, causing him to drop the “Heil” from his surname, his parents were both killed in concentration camps. Long before there was a wildly popular brand, there was Emanuel Heilbronner. It's painful - I don't mean to gloss over the parts that are full of suffering - in terms of its origins, it didn't start perfectly.” “If people didn't love the soap, we wouldn't be having this conversation.” But Lamm acknowledges the brand has a complicated history, too. Bronner’s in the early aughts for her 2006 documentary about the company, Dr. “The soap is really good,” says filmmaker Sara Lamm, who began researching Dr. So how has the brand with the kooky label managed to become the kind of beloved staple that sticks around for nearly 75 years? Not only does the label present an aesthetic anomaly, but it features a philosophical-religious manifesto that references Jesus, Confucius, Halley’s comet, and Carl Sagan, complete with exclamation point-peppered declarations about the “All-One-God-Faith” that will unite the human race on “Spaceship Earth.” In a sea of minimalist, design-centric beauty packaging, they stick out. Bronner’s products, from cleaners to hand sanitizers, are most recognizable for their labels, which feature walls of text more densely packed than a pre-pandemic subway at rush hour. And even celebrities with seemingly unlimited access to luxury products - like Meghan Markle, Chloë Sevigny, and Anwar Hadid - are fans of the brand, which sells 8-ounce bottles of castile soap for $7.ĭr. Bronner’s praises (“It's a good benchmark for comparing to other things … in terms of how clean you feel,” says Ali Oshinsky, a former editor at Glossier’s Into the Gloss blog). Multiple members of the Glossier team, past and present, including Chief Marketing Officer Ali Weiss, sing Dr. Diarrha N'Diaye-Mbaye, founder of makeup company Ami Colé, uses the peppermint-scented castile soap. April Gargiulo, founder of luxury skin care label Vintner’s Daughter, is raising her kids on it (“It’s a brand I can feel good about from a safety standpoint, from an environmental standpoint, and from an ethical standpoint,” she says). Bronner’s castile soap, DeFino joined a slew of beauty insiders who have enthusiastically embraced the nearly 75-year-old brand. “I liked that it was organic, that the ingredients were fair trade, and that it's concentrated, so one bottle could last me about a year.” “It was a little gentler on the skin, and it was cheap and widely available,” says DeFino, who’s reported for publications like Allure, the New York Times, and Vogue. The beauty reporter, who had access to a wide range of pricey sample products, tested hundreds of options, ultimately landing on an inexpensive, sold-at-Walmart brand: Dr. She’d developed a severe case of dermatitis and needed soaps that wouldn’t aggravate her condition. In 2015, writer Jessica DeFino started a search for gentler skin care products.
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