I wish I could say I dislike body wash for noble reasons—that I use too much too fast, and I don’t want the blood of another single-use plastic on my hands. Really, it’s because I enjoy the satisfying weight of a bar in my palm.
But it’s a pleasure I’ve mostly given up while on the road, because if there’s one thing I like less than body wash, it’s a mushy bar of soap.
For long trips in particular, a bar of soap is theoretically great. One little bar lasts many, many washes, and it doesn’t count as a liquid in your carry-on. But a traditional bar soap case can take up precious space in a dopp kit, and bar soap can get gross in a plastic bag.
It’s a common plight. When Wirecutter senior product designer Darius Guerrero packs light for multimonth sojourns, he throws his bar soap in a sandwich bag. It serves its purpose for a time, but he often finds himself tossing the bag mid-trip because it gets irrecoverably gunky and sometimes even starts to leak. At this point, the soap might be so mushy that he’ll toss that, too.
Mushy soap, it turns out, isn’t just yucky. Cosmetic chemist Kelly Dobos told me that even though bar soap is generally hostile to microbes, mushy bars are more prone to growing bacteria because they’re diluted with water.
Haunted by this information and memories of my own gunky sandwich bags of yore, I did what everyone does: I checked Reddit.
Every few months—particularly in the r/onebag community dedicated to light packing—someone asks about the best way to travel with bar soap. And every few months, a chorus of voices has the same answer: the Matador FlatPak Soap Bar Case.
With that, I had my mission.
Matador FlatPak Soap Bar Case
A bag for mush-free bar soap
This small, leakproof, roll-top bag conforms to the size of your bar soap and allows it to dry before your next shower. But it’s more expensive than most alternatives.
The Matador FlatPak Soap Bar Case is a small, roll-top bag that makes two alluring promises: It takes up very little space, and it dries quickly in the leakproof bag thanks to a proprietary coating.
I compared the Matador FlatPak Soap Bar Case with three alternatives: a disposable sandwich bag, a reusable silicone bag, and a plastic bar soap case. Maria Adelmann/NYT Wirecutter
To put these claims to the test, I compared the Matador soap bag with three alternatives: a disposable plastic sandwich bag, a reusable silicone bag, and a classic plastic bar soap case. I also used the Matador soap bag alongside a sandwich bag for a week to test and compare its functionality with regular use.
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A perfect-size soap bag that’s durable, too
I was immediately impressed with the construction of the Matador soap bag, though I wasn’t surprised by it. Matador is an established outdoor brand that we’ve found to be reputable, with its products earning top spots in several of our guides, including “The Best Packable Daypack for Travel” and “The Best Duffle Bags.”
The fabric (coated Cordura nylon) is almost as thin as paper yet feels extremely durable. The roll-top easily rolls the required three times, and the buckle construction is simple but practical, allowing you to attach the soap case around a loop on a backpack or suitcase so the soap bag can dry in the open air. As advertised, it doesn’t leak at all. My only small gripe is that it’s easy to trap air in the bag as you roll.
Another boon of the Matador bar soap bag is its size. Much like a flexible sandwich bag, it never takes up much more space than the amount of soap you travel with. This is a stark contrast to a silicone bag, which has a more rigid structure that makes it difficult to fold, and to a standard soap case, which can take up a significant chunk of a smaller toiletry bag.
Matador’s soap bag conforms to the size of your soap, and it can hook on the outside of your luggage or backpack to dry. Maria Adelmann/NYT Wirecutter
The Matador soap bag easily fits a standard bar of soap, such as the ovular 3.75-ounce Dove Beauty Bar I used in my tests. I also tried a rectangular 5-ounce bar from Dr. Bronner’s, an all-in-one traveler favorite. It just fits with three rolls of the roll-top closure. Some people might find the tight fit frustrating, but I felt it was a manageable inconvenience for a bar destined to get smaller with time. (For even bigger bars, some stores still sell an XL version of the Matador soap bag.)
It doesn’t dry soap as quickly as I expected—surprisingly, that didn’t matter
To determine if the Matador soap bag really dried soap faster than other methods, I conducted three tests comparing it with several alternatives (a disposable sandwich bag, a silicone bag, and a plastic case). In each test, I submerged Dove bars1 in water for 15 minutes and then let them dry to varying degrees before I put them in their containers.
I conducted several tests to see which container dried soap the fastest. Maria Adelmann/NYT Wirecutter
In two of the three tests, after hours of drying time, the bar soap from the Matador bag was deemed driest, but only marginally so. In the third test, the bars were not appreciably different from each other. (For the two tests where it wasn’t immediately obvious which soap was driest, I had a volunteer blindly rank them.) In one test, I put the bars in their containers soaking wet. After 18 hours, none of the bars, including the one in the Matador bag, had fully dried.
In two of the three tests, the soap from the Matador bag was driest, but only marginally so. Maria Adelmann/NYT Wirecutter
But I was worried that soaking the bar soap didn’t accurately mimic the less dramatic way soap tends to get wet in a shower. So for a week, I showered with two bars of soap, one of which went into the plastic sandwich bag and one of which went into the Matador soap bag.
This is where the Matador bag really stood out. The bag and the soap inside it always dried before my next shower, while the interior of the sandwich bag and the soap inside never completely dried, even after one 48-hour stint.
The Matador bag stood out in real-world testing. Soap in the Matador bag always dried before my next shower, and soap from the (very gunky) sandwich bag never dried. Maria Adelmann/NYT Wirecutter
I also hated the feeling of pulling the soap out of the slimy, gunky sandwich bag, which I fought the urge to replace over the course of a week. Meanwhile, the Matador soap bag, with its easy-to-rinse opaque exterior, always looked clean. Any gunk inside was hidden from view and totally dry when I needed my soap.
Interestingly, Matador’s instructions say that the soap will dry faster when the bag is exposed to air, but I didn’t find much of a difference in drying time between putting the Matador bag on the counter versus in a toiletry bag.
My real-world experience lines up with that of deputy editorial director Maxine Builder, who has owned the Matador soap bar bag for almost a year and uses it to hold her shaving bar, even when she showers at home.
Most of the time, she doesn’t even think about the bag. “I seal the bar of soap up after using it, even when it’s sopping wet, and when I open it up later, it’s dry and ready to go, neither slimy nor soft and mushy,” Maxine says. It’s kind of pricey for a simple bag, she admits, but she thinks it looks and feels nicer than a plastic case.
It’s functional but has inherent flaws
Perhaps the biggest downside of any bar soap bag is that, unlike with a classic soap case, it doesn’t double as a soap dish.
Although the Matador soap bag has a buckle, I didn’t have a spot to clip it in my shower, and I didn’t like the idea of trying to fish the soap from the bag as I showered. Instead, I ended up using the bag itself as a kind of soap dish, which worked surprisingly well.
I thought dealing with a soaked bag would be a pain, but the exterior dries rather quickly. In my apartment, it dried in minutes if I quickly toweled it off first, or about a half hour if I didn’t, save the roll-top strap. Maxine lets hers sit out for a bit before dropping it in her toiletry bag.
If you need to wash the whole bar soap bag, note that the sleek, leakproof interior does not dry nearly as quickly as the outside. Luckily, it’s easier to flip inside out than a silicone bag, and you can wipe it dry with a towel.
It’s a serious step up from a sandwich bag
There’s a reason one-baggers love Matador’s soap bag. It’s more durable than a sandwich bag, easier to use and more flexible than a silicone bag, and much smaller than a soap case.
If you’re not bent on saving space and have some time to air-dry your soap before packing up, you might still prefer a standard-issue soap case. These tend to be inexpensive and, crucially, also double as a soap dish. (Though I conducted my tests with a plastic soap case, silicone or aluminum cases will likely be more durable over time.)
But when competing against other bags, the Matador soap bag was the clear winner. It didn’t dry soap nearly as quickly as I expected, but in practice fast-drying wasn’t really what I wanted. Bar soap from the Matador bag was always dry by my next shower. Bar soap from the (very gunky) sandwich bag was not.
However you decide to store your soap while traveling, try to prevent your bar from getting mushy. It will limit bacterial growth, and your soap will last longer. One way to do this is by choosing a bar that’s less prone to getting soft, such as a triple-milled soap.
You should also let your bar dry as much as possible before putting it away. If you don’t have the time, give it a quick pat with a towel. I tried this method during my tests and found that it could reduce in-bag drying time by more than six hours. Sustainability editor and long-time soap dabber Katie Okamoto enjoys the ritual. “There’s something so adorable about patting dry your soap,” she says, “and then tucking it in.”
Which is how I’ve come to think of Matador’s case as a tiny sleeping bag for your soap.
This article was edited by Hannah Rimm and Maxine Builder.