Soft Soap Stories

I use liquid soap .....

Bar v Liquid ... The Eternal Struggle.

.... a bold and confident statement I admit, but one I am confident will remain the truth.

but it wasn't always so. Until a decade or so ago, I was still a hard soap man, and indeed there are still two wrapped soap bars under the bathroom sink even as I write (Safeway UK would you believe! - that dates them to pre-2005). But once I had discovered the joys of liquid soap, I never looked back.

Now, I have posted in the past about the history of soap, and humanities long and not always close association with this life saving product, so I am not going to repeat all that again (phew, I hear you think). No, my interest in this post, is why some people are hard soapers, and others are liquid soapers.  

In the dim and distant past, we were all liquid soapers, as the only soap available was made by using the plant Soapwort in Mesolithic era. Its a pink flowered plant but its the leaves (and root?s), that have most of the agents required to make a soapy water sludge. So a liquid soap can be produced by bruising and soaking the leaves in water, but no one knows exactly how this was discovered, and how long it has been used for that purpose. However, as it is suitable for both the skin and hair, this suggests centuries or even millenniums of usage.

Soap Bars In Prisons Have A Bad Reputation ....

But when cheap hard soap came along in bulk in the 19th century (which of course was more easily sold in bars), the world seemed to move to bars of carbolic type soap, and the liquid version became a specialist usage product (chemical processes etc) and soap dispensers in public toilets such as railways, petrol (gas) stations, hotel and pubs etc. Anywhere in fact where the public would steal the soap bars or drop them on the floor ... but not prisons for some reason. 

But in the last few decades, soap is increasingly sold to the general public in pump dispensers, and hard bars are not visible. In fact apart from very specialist (and thus pricey), lady skin soaps e.g. Dove, I can hardly think of any hard soap being advertised.on TV. So now, liquid soap is more popular than bar soaps in the UK.

However, and there is always going to be a however in these sorts of post (or where's the fun?), there is an argument made for the continued usage of hard soap.

1. Tradition: We have been using soap for 3,000 years. But in fact mass usage has only been for the last 100 - 150 years but this has largely been in the form of bars.
2. Luxury: Some people think that there is a sense of luxury in sniffing and handling a bar of soap, as opposed to a quick squirt of liquid soap. However I shower 100 per cent of the time, so I would argue that solid soap bars and showers are just incompatible (and I don't just mean in Prisons!!).  But I will admit, that a nicely wrapped soap bar makes a better gift than a dispenser - but who really gives soap as a gift these days?
3. Psychological: Traditionalist claim that using a bar of soap gives a psychological boost to the washer, as they literally use it to scrub that dirt away .... what? You do the same with liquid soap once it's out and in your hands.
4. Its Greener: You can buy bars of soap without packaging, or very little paper around them, whereas dispenser require both plastic and some metal for the spring. So hard soap packaging is greener. I concede this last point, but its got to be marginal.  

Having reviewed this list of reasons, I am still not converted back.