Fleur de Sel vs. Himalayan Salt: Hand-Skimmed Sea Salt and Pink Rock Salt Compared

Both get sold as premium finishing salts, but they’re made in opposite ways. Fleur de sel is skimmed by hand from the surface of the brine in seawater salt pans; Himalayan salt is rock salt, mined in Pakistan and tinted pink by traces of iron oxide. The difference you’ll notice is the crystal: fine, slightly damp flakes against hard, dry, pink grains. Chemically they’re close. When a Swiss government lab analyzed four samples of each, every one came out between 36.9% and 38.8% sodium.¹

Side by side

Where each one comes from

Fleur de sel. Guérande’s salt marshes make two salts from the same pans. Gray salt (sel gris) crystallizes on the clay bottom of the shallow basins and is gathered by hand by the salt worker, the paludier. Fleur de sel forms instead as crystals floating in sheets on the surface of the brine, only when the weather cooperates with wind and sun, and is skimmed off by hand. Under the specification it’s white, sometimes faintly pink, holds no more than 12% moisture and less than 0.20% insoluble matter, and can’t contain additives.² Fleur de sel is made elsewhere too. Two of the four samples in the Swiss survey below were labeled as from the Camargue, in southern France,¹ and the Guérande rules don’t apply to those.

Himalayan salt. Harriet Hall of Science-Based Medicine says the salt beds were laid down by ancient oceans about 250 million years ago.⁵ The commercial product comes from Pakistan, where the state-owned Pakistan Mineral Development Corporation runs the Khewra mine, which it calls the world’s second largest salt mine.⁴ Morton says only that its own pink salt is sourced from the Himalayan Mountains.⁶ The pink comes from traces of iron oxide.³ You’ll often read that the color comes from minerals left by bacteria in an evaporated sea. We found no source for that.

What’s in them: one laboratory, both salts

Most mineral comparisons between salts mix studies, sample sets and methods. A May 2016 report by Switzerland’s Federal Food Safety and Veterinary Office (FSVO) is an exception: it analyzed 25 salts, including four fleur de sel and four Himalaya salts, in one project. The salts were bought from local shops or online.¹

Scope. The fleur de sel samples were labeled as from the Camargue (two), Greece (one; the report notes this may be the packing country) and undeclared (one). None was from Guérande. Three Himalaya samples were labeled Pakistan, two of them Punjab; one was labeled South Africa, again possibly the packing country.¹ The figures describe these eight samples, not either salt in general.

All figures from the FSVO report’s Tables 1 to 3.¹

What the table tells you, and what it doesn’t:

• Sodium is nearly the same. Neither is a low-sodium salt. The American Heart Association says table salt and most sea salts are about 40% sodium.⁸
• The extras are small. A potassium content of 2.2 g/kg is 0.22% of the salt by weight, by our math. The highest fleur de sel iodine figure, 61.7 µg/kg, compares with 45 micrograms per gram in US iodized salt,⁷ which is 45,000 µg/kg. That puts iodized salt more than 700 times higher, again by our math.
• Himalayan salt’s iron is rust, not a supplement. The report says the iron in these salts is mainly present as insoluble iron oxide.¹
• Contaminants. The report found specialty salts generally carried more contaminants than standard salts, but most contaminants didn’t reach even 1% of tolerable intake levels.¹ Aluminum, at tens of thousands of µg/kg in every Himalaya sample and below detection in every fleur de sel, is the clearest difference between the two in the tables.
• The verdict. The FSVO concluded that specialty salts don’t have any advantages over standard salts, nor nutritional properties that would make them a recommended standard choice.¹

A separate study lands in the same place for pink salt. Flavia Fayet-Moore and colleagues analyzed 31 pink salts bought in Australia in 2018 and found substantially more calcium than in a white table salt control, along with other minerals. Even so, a 5 g teaspoon made no clinically significant contribution to nutrient intake except sodium, and it would take more than 30 g a day, about 6 teaspoons, for the minerals to matter. At that point the sodium would cancel out any benefit.³ Those were different samples measured by different methods, so don’t mix the two studies’ numbers.

In the kitchen

America’s Test Kitchen found that sea salts vary in color but only slightly in flavor, and that once mixed into food, sea salt tastes no different from table salt. ATK recommends sea salts as finishing salts.⁹ So the real question is what each one does on the surface of your food:

• Fleur de sel gives fine, slightly damp crystals that crunch briefly and dissolve. A pinch over sliced steak, fish, ripe tomatoes, eggs or caramel is the classic use.
• Coarse Himalayan salt gives a harder, longer crunch and a pink fleck that shows up on pale food like fish, eggs and dressed greens.
• Inside a dish, in soups, doughs and pasta water, the crystals dissolve and the difference disappears.

Two common claims have no test behind them that we found: that fleur de sel’s moisture gives it a briny smell you can pick up, and that Himalayan salt’s bigger crystals taste less “instantly salty.” You can also buy Himalayan salt blocks for cooking and serving; see cooking with Himalayan salt.

Can one stand in for the other?

Yes, almost always. Only the texture and color change. These follow our fleur de sel substitute page.

How we got these. By weight: the Codex standard requires food-grade salt to be at least 97% sodium chloride on a dry basis,¹⁰ and Guérande fleur de sel can hold up to 12% moisture,² so a gram of fleur de sel can’t carry more salt than a gram of dry salt. The Swiss sodium figures overlap closely too.¹ By volume, there’s no published weight for a teaspoon of fleur de sel. Morton’s chart treats a teaspoon of its Himalayan salt as equal to a teaspoon of table salt (the chart only applies between Morton products),¹¹ so the starting points borrow the table-salt approach from the substitute page. They’re cautious starting points, not measured equivalents.

Health notes

• Sodium. Both are about the same share of sodium, and the AHA says total sodium intake is what matters most for heart health. A coarse salt holds less sodium per teaspoon only because fewer crystals fit in the spoon.⁸ The FDA’s Daily Value for sodium is less than 2,300 mg a day.¹²
• Iodine. The NIH Office of Dietary Supplements lists both fleur de sel and Himalayan salt among specialty salts that aren’t usually iodized.⁷ The trace iodine in the Swiss fleur de sel samples is far too low to replace iodized salt (see above).
• Health claims. Hall looks at claims that Himalayan salt detoxifies, lowers blood pressure or strengthens bones and finds no evidence for them.⁵ We make no claim that either salt treats or prevents any condition.

What isn’t known

• We found no published weight per teaspoon for fleur de sel.
• We found no composition analysis of Guérande fleur de sel. The Swiss fleur de sel samples came from elsewhere.
• We found no published moisture figure for Himalayan salt.
• We found no taste test comparing the two salts directly.
• We found no dated, sourced price comparison.

Related

• Fleur de sel and Himalayan salt, the full profiles
• Fleur de sel substitutes
• Fleur de sel vs. sea salt, fleur de sel vs. kosher salt and fleur de sel vs. Maldon salt
• Himalayan salt vs. table salt, Himalayan salt vs. sea salt and Celtic salt vs. Himalayan salt
• Iodized vs. non-iodized salt and the best salt for cooking