“Soapack” by Mi Zhou,
Central Saint Martins post-graduate student Mi Zhou has created toiletry bottles called Soapack that are cast from soap and melt away once they are no longer useful.
To make each Soapack, vegetable oil-based soap is dyed using pigments from minerals, plants and flowers and formed in a mould, in a process similar to slip-casting ceramics.
A thin layer of beeswax is used to line the bottles to make them waterproof, and prevent the liquid contents from dissolving the bottles before they are used up.
Users can keep Soapack bottles in a dry place to preserve them, or rest them on a soap dish and allow them to melt away on contact with water and with use.
To complete her concept Zhou consulted with Yanhao Shi, a soap artisan, and Luis Spitz, an expert in the soap industry
A standard plastic bottle can take up to 450 years to break down, and non-recycled plastic often ends up polluting the ocean.
Photography is by Tom Mannion and Xinjia Zhou.
