The Soap on Alone: What Contestants Actually Use

Soap sits in the item catalog's "clothing-adjacent" bucket alongside toothpaste, dental floss, towel, and razor, five personal-care categories that compete for a ten-item slot against a knife or a fishing kit. Of the 187 contestants across every US, Australian, and spinoff season, 101 have a recorded gear list, and soap is the only one of those five categories to show up at all: 3 of 101, a genuinely rare pick, but not a zero.

The season 12 connection

Two of the three carriers come from the same season. Nathan Olsen won season 12 in South Africa's Great Karoo after 34 days, the shortest winning run on record, with soap as one of his ten picks. Fourth-place finisher Baha Mahmutov, on the same season, also carried soap, tapping out at day 19 after struggling with fire maintenance and food scarcity. The third carrier, Cade Cole, brought soap to season 10 and placed sixth at 23 days before a medical evacuation following a loss of consciousness. There's no season 12-specific rule pushing soap into more packs there; with three total picks spread across only two seasons, it reads as two individual contestants making the same call rather than a location-driven pattern.

What a bar of soap is actually doing in a ten-item pack

A general-purpose bar soap earns its keep on more than washing hands. It can clean a wound before it gets infected, cut grease off cooking gear so a pot doesn't go rancid between uses, and handle laundry on a multi-week or multi-month stay where the same base layer gets worn every day regardless of the weather. Against a ten-item cap those secondary uses matter more than the hygiene angle alone would, since a category that only prevented body odor would be a hard sell against a second knife or extra cordage.

Contestant	Season	Result	Notes
Nathan Olsen	US 12	Won, 34 days	Only complete 10-item list in the trio
Baha Mahmutov	US 12	4th, 19 days	Same season as Olsen
Cade Cole	US 10	6th, 23 days	Medically evacuated

Why it's still one of the rarest picks on the list

The catalog tags soap "occasionally-picked," sourced from an outside gear write-up, which is consistent with 3 of 101 landing above the hard zero of toothpaste, dental floss, towel, and razor but nowhere near common. The catalog's single product example, a Dr. Bronner's Pure-Castile bar priced around $4 to $6, is flagged as a generic category illustration rather than a verified pick tied to any of the three real carriers above, so no brand can be attributed to Olsen's, Mahmutov's, or Cole's actual soap. Weight and slot cost explain the rest of the rarity: a bar of soap does nothing to build shelter, start fire, or catch food, the three categories that dominate every winner's list, which is why even a genuinely useful multi-purpose item like this loses out on 98 of 101 recorded packs.

For the other four clothing-adjacent categories and how the ten-item rule treats hygiene versus standard-issue clothing, see clothing on Alone: what doesn't count toward your 10 items. The soap gear page has the category's full catalog entry, and Nathan Olsen's full winning list breaks down all ten of his season 12 picks.