A marbled bar and two original variants.

Zest is an American brand of bar soap and body wash that began at Procter & Gamble. English Wikipedia says P&G introduced Zest in 1955 and launched it nationally in 1957; the brand’s current website, run by its present owner, carries the line “Est 1952”. Both dates are given here as their sources state them.

Wikipedia describes the original bar as a combination of ordinary soap and synthetic detergent ingredients, and says it was marbled in appearance. It came in two variants at the start: Aqua, and a yellow, lemon-scented Citrus. By the mid-1960s, Wikipedia says, the bar no longer had its marbled look.

P&G took the name abroad in the following decades. Wikipedia records a launch in France in 1977, followed by Italy and the United Kingdom in 1982, and says the European Zest was a yellow, marbled bar that was later withdrawn from Europe. In the United States the brand stayed in the P&G soap aisle for more than half a century, alongside the company’s other bars.

Wikipedia also records a change of direction in 2007, when P&G relaunched the bar with a new shape and a new fragrance and extended the line into Zest body wash, a liquid in a plastic bottle.

Over the years Wikipedia lists a long run of scent names on Zest bars and washes, with a variant called Whitewater Fresh that it says was discontinued in 2006 and brought back in 2012.

Brynwood, High Ridge Brands, Unilever and Sodalis.

On 4 January 2011, Forbes reported that the private equity firm Brynwood Partners VI L.P., based in Greenwich, Connecticut, had acquired Zest from Procter & Gamble, in a deal that closed that day on undisclosed terms. Wikipedia says the purchase covered the North American and Caribbean rights and was made through Brynwood’s subsidiary High Ridge Brands. Forbes quoted a P&G spokesperson, Jay Gooch, as saying the company felt Zest, with its “loyal core following in the U.S. and Canada”, was a better fit for an owner that would bring greater focus to it, and reported that P&G would keep the rights to the brand in Mexico for the time being.

The new owner said at the time that it meant to keep the old slogan. Dario Margve, a managing partner at Brynwood, told Forbes that the “Zestfully clean!” line “still resonates very strongly with consumers”, and described plans for coupons, newspaper inserts, social media and traditional advertising.

The rest of the world followed separately. On 22 December 2014, Unilever announced that it was buying the Camay brand globally and the Zest brand outside North America and the Caribbean from Procter & Gamble, with completion expected in the opening half of 2015 subject to regulatory approval. Unilever said the deal also included P&G’s bar soap manufacturing plant in Mexico, and its personal-care president, Alan Jope, named Mexico as a priority market. Wikipedia dates the completed acquisition to 2015.

In North America the brand changed hands again. On 3 October 2024, Business Wire carried an announcement that Tengram Capital Partners, which had acquired High Ridge Brands — by then called HRB Brands — in April 2020, was selling HRB to Sodalis Group, which the release described as a European beauty and personal care platform. HRB’s portfolio then included Zest alongside Alberto VO5, Coast, Brut and Pert. Sodalis’s chief executive, Fabio Granata, said in the same release that the company had been born in a small Italian province and was now entering the American market with a direct affiliate.

The result is a brand split by territory. The Zest website’s footer names Sodalis USA, LLC, and Wikipedia describes Sodalis USA as the owner for the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico and Unilever as the owner for the rest of the world. Sodalis Group has owned HRB, and with it the North American Zest, since that 2024 sale.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group all sell soap, body wash or shampoo, and they sit at very different points in the trade. Some still belong to the company that first registered the name; others have passed through several owners, been licensed out, or been revived years after their original makers stopped using them. A single name can move from one parent group to another without the product on the shelf changing much at all.

In this category a brand’s identity is carried by a small set of surfaces: the paper or film wrapper around a bar, the printed label on a pump bottle or a squeeze tube, and the advertising that surrounds them. Those surfaces are redrawn often, and a wordmark, a colour or a slogan may outlast several owners, factories and formulas.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who started the brand, who has owned it and since when, where the product is made and how its packaging and advertising have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A slogan that outlasted its maker.

The Zest identity has always leaned on words as much as on colour. Wikipedia credits the line “You’re not fully clean unless you’re Zestfully clean!” to James Jordan of the advertising agency BBDO, and says it ran through the brand’s advertising of the 1980s and early 1990s. Television commercials, it says, worked the slogan into a jingle and closed on someone holding up a towel with “Zestfully clean” printed on the back, and towels of that kind were given away in company promotions.

Earlier advertising, Wikipedia says, told viewers that Zest was not a soap at all, and a commercial from around 1970 dipped two photographs of a person into two bowls labelled “soap” and “Zest” to make the point on screen.

The original line-up named its variants plainly: Wikipedia lists Aqua and the yellow, lemon-scented Citrus, sold as a marbled bar in the 1950s. The current website shows bar soap and body wash side by side under the Zest name, with the invitation to “clean zestfully”.

Ownership has not changed that vocabulary. Brynwood’s partner told Forbes in 2011 that the new owner would keep the slogan, and the website carrying a 2025 Sodalis USA copyright line still uses the word in its copy. The split between Sodalis in North America and Unilever elsewhere means the same name can now be drawn by two companies for two sets of markets.

For a design guide, Zest shows how a one-word name, a two-colour variant system and a slogan that turns the name into an adverb can carry a bar through several owners and into a body-wash bottle. Compare it with Coast, which sat in the same HRB portfolio, and Irish Spring, Colgate-Palmolive’s green-and-white bar. For this guide we use aqua blue, citrus yellow and deep teal with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Zest’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.