What do you know about soap?
The soap we use every day. When the COVID-19 was severe, it became a condition launch to wear a mask outside and to go inside and wash your hands with soap.
More than once I had instructed my children to wash their hands after school. But after my children asked me questions about soap, I suddenly realized that I knew very little about soap.
In the United States, soap is a very inexpensive consumer product. We can find soap in every home in the country. However, if asked about the history of soap, very few people would be able to answer the question. That is why I am writing this article. I want to be able to progress with the children and learn something new and different.
I looked up a lot of historical information and found that the Mesopotamians first made soap. They heated a mixture of animal fat, water, and ash and eventually got the most primitive soap.
In the Middle Ages, people began to use plants to make soap. There was a fruit of a tree that had excellent stain-removing abilities and the name was gleditsia sinensis. A new type of vegetable oil soap was introduced, praised for its mildness, cleansing power, and smell. This soap, however, was only for the aristocracy. It was very similar to Napoleon’s aluminum cutlery.
The colonization of the Americas between 1500 and 1700 coincided with another European trend: most Europeans, rich and poor, abandoned the customary way of bathing for fear that water would spread disease. The colonists relied heavily on the soap for household cleaning, and making soap was mandatory for housewives.
After the founding of the United States, manufacturers such as the Colgate Company, founded in New York in 1807, and the Procter & Gamble Company, founded in Cincinnati in 1837, added to the production of soap but left the ingredients and uses of soap largely unchanged. The American middle class returned to water bathing, but still rejected soap.
At this time the soap industry was still only a by-product of the animal fat trade, which was inseparable from the manufacture of candles. The use of soap was for washing clothes. In Procter & Gamble’s first factory, workers used large pots to heat grease collected from homes, hotels and slaughterhouses to make candles and soap for sale.
In 1879, Procter & Gamble introduced Ivory Soap, one of the first bath soaps introduced in the United States. The BJ Johnson Soap Company of Milwaukee followed in 1898 with Palmolive, a soap made primarily from palm oil and olive oil (now merged with Colgate). It was the world’s best-selling soap in the early 20th century.
However, the soap’s ability to remove dirt is actually limited by the quality of the water. When there are too many calcium and magnesium ions in the water, the soap’s ability to remove stains decreases. Later on, some companies developed water softeners. The most famous would be Calgon. Impressive, the ancient Chinese secret detergent is hard to forget.
The chemical process of making soap also began to shift, paving the way for modern times. Procter & Gamble experimented for years with imported coconut and palm oils, then introduced domestic cottonseed oil, and finally discovered hydrogenated lipids in 1909. This hard, plant-based lipid revolutionized soap, and soap production was never again highly dependent on animal by-products.
The shortage of fats and oils during the First and Second World Wars led to the introduction of synthetic detergents, which became a superior alternative to fat-based laundry soaps, household cleaners, and shampoos.
Today’s commercial soaps are highly segmented and carefully engineered in laboratories. In addition to synthetic animal fats and vegetable oils, added ingredients such as emolliency, smoothing, lathering, coloring, and fragrance retention enhance the sensory experience of the soap.
But all this does not completely obscure the most pungent elements, such as some of the petroleum-based ingredients in body washes.
