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A Few Nice Things People Have Said About Us Lately
We keep a Press page on our site, which is usually where media coverage goes rather than into a blog post. But the last few months have brought an unusually good run of mentions across beauty, design, business and home publications, and enough of them touched on different parts of what we do that we thought it was worth collecting a few here.
Some focused on the products themselves. Others were more interested in why we make them the way we do, or how a refill business that began in Brooklyn has grown into hospitality, the UK and Australia, and a physical fragrance space in Lower Manhattan. Taken together, they’re a useful snapshot of where Element Brooklyn is right now.
TODAY: Mandarin Crush, beyond the soap bottle
In August, TODAY included our Mandarin Crush Hand & Body Cream in its roundup of the best hand creams of 2026, tested and reviewed by its shopping team. Contributor Annie Shigo’s verdict: “The scent is light, but it stays on you for a long period of time.”
Mandarin Crush was one of the fragrances Element Brooklyn was built around, so it’s especially satisfying to see it recognized in a different format. The idea was never that a fragrance should belong to a single bottle or product category. It should be something you can return to throughout a routine, whether that means soap at the sink or cream afterwards.
Men’s Health: the upgrade guests notice
Also in August, Men’s Health’s Danny Perez made the case that fancy hand soap is the bathroom upgrade guests always notice — for less than $50 — and pointed readers to our Wild Pear Hand Soap.
We’ve always liked that soap occupies a strange middle ground between necessity and design object. Everyone needs it, almost everyone keeps it on display, and it’s one of the few things in a bathroom a guest will definitely use. Upgrading it is a lot easier than renovating the bathroom, and in our experience causes fewer disputes with contractors.
Real Simple: when spending less works better
In late August, Real Simple’s editors compared pricey products with budget alternatives they genuinely prefer. Senior shopping editor Euna Park’s pick was our Mandarin Crush Hand Soap: “I refill my bathroom soaps with Element Brooklyn’s line of scents.”
That’s close to the original premise behind Element Brooklyn. We love expensive fragrance and have no objection to luxury products simply because they’re luxurious. What we’ve always questioned is the assumption that the price proves the product is better. Fragrance in particular supports some enormous markups, even when the formula inside the package is a small part of what you’re paying for — we’ve written about where that money actually goes. Our aim is to keep the things that make a product feel special — the fragrance, the formula and the design — while dropping the parts of the traditional luxury cost structure that don’t need to be there.
House Beautiful: refill the candle, not the jar
In July, House Beautiful associate shopping editor Janae McKenzie picked our Dusk in Eden Candle Refill for a roundup of under-$50 upgrades that made the biggest difference to editors’ daily lives, writing that “Element Brooklyn stands up for all the scent-obsessives on a budget.”
Candle vessels have always seemed like an obvious candidate for reuse. They’re heavy, expensive to make and often attractive enough that nobody wants to throw them away. Once the wick reaches the bottom, there’s very little reason for the whole object to become waste. Our candle refills were designed around that observation — here’s how they work — so seeing the refill recognized, rather than just the candle, was particularly welcome.
Forbes and Beauty Independent: behind the products
Two of the most substantial recent pieces looked beyond individual products.
For Forbes, Kate Hardcastle interviewed our founder, Andrew Nicol, about the refill model and the practical question at the center of it: sustainability only matters at scale if customers actually want to take part. Asking someone to choose the environmentally preferable option while making it more expensive, less convenient or less desirable is a difficult way to change behavior. Our approach has been to make refilling attractive on its own terms: less packaging, but also a lower replacement cost and no need to keep buying the decorative container.
Element Brooklyn’s approach makes the refillable vessel part of the lifestyle proposition.
Kate Hardcastle, Forbes
In September, Beauty Independent’s Polly Blitzer took a broader look at Element Brooklyn’s growth, including the Gallery of Scent, our hospitality program and the company’s evolution from an online soap business into something much more centered on fragrance.
That last part feels particularly accurate right now. We still make a lot of soap, but the projects we’re most excited about increasingly involve helping people understand fragrance in different ways: smelling individual ingredients at the Gallery, making a formula in the Fragrance Studio, discovering a scent in a restaurant, or trying the whole collection through the new Discovery Set.
We’re grateful to every publication that has taken the time to cover what we’re doing. More than that, we’re grateful to the customers who gave them something to write about in the first place.
