Give Up Your Soap
“Since the soap bars would get too little to use, like they do now, mother did not discard them, but melted them all together and ended up with the ugliest, misshapen “bar” of soap anyone ever saw.” A comment from Barbara to How Would Grandma Bathe.
It looks like I am going to give up soap - liquid hand soap from a pump that is. I have used liquid soap for years. I try to reuse my disposable plastic pumps as long as they will last as well as refill my glass pumps. However, they all stop working eventually. I have a glass pump sitting by my kitchen sink right now that I am sure I spent at least $10.00 on. The pump part of it is plastic and cracked on the inside. I can still get soap out of it but it is a leaky mess. When I have to toss out a pump, I recycle as much of it as I can but the rest goes into the trash. I am pretty sure the pump part of most dispensers cannot be recycled.
I looked at the ingredients listed on my liquid hand soap refill container and most of them are unrecognizable. Sodium C14-16 Olefin Sulfonate, Lauramide DEA, Glycol Stearate, Sodium Chloride, Cocamidopropyl Betaine, Fragrance, DMDM Hydartoin, Polyquaternium-7, Citric Acid, Aloe Barbadensis Leaf Juice, Tetrasodium EDTA, Mel (Honey), Lactose, Milk Protein, Glycerin, Hydrolized Silk, D&C Yellow No. 10, and FD&C Red No. 40.
Although it is not in my soap ingredients listed above, there is a growing controversy over antibacterial chemicals such as Triclosan that have been showing up in all things soap related in recent years. If you are interested in learning more, the website Food and Water Watch has an informative article called What’s Lurking in Your Soap?
Most homemade or all natural bar soap have a minimal number of ingredients. I have a bar of hand soap made by a local company and it contains palm oil, water, goat milk, flax seed, coconut, rice bran, sunflower and olive oils, lye, shea butter, palm kernel and essential oils, silk fibre. I recognize each of those ingredients.
Bar soap usually has little to no packaging. When I have purchased it from a local source there is often only a little piece of wax paper, a small piece of cardboard or nothing at all used for packaging. Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. I have been recycling for awhile but I want to work on the other R’s - especially reducing the amount of items I throw away or recycle. If I follow my grandparents’ lead, bar soap is one area where I can reduce my use of packaging.
I am a little nervous about the “yuck” factor with bar soap. I am sure it is going to leave my sinks a little more messy. I will probably find blobs of soap on the floor from those times when one of my kids is washing their hands only to lose control of the bar and send it shooting to the floor. I suppose it is a good excuse to give my much neglected bathroom floors some spot cleaning.
I have been using a locally made bar soap from Kinderhaven Farms (contact Joy at kinderhavensoap@voyager.net) which is available at Harvest Health. I also recently bought some soap from Brickyard Farms (contact Cate at laneburke@aol.com) at my local Farmer’s Market. I am going to pick up some soap this week from a local online retailer called Vintage Fresh Soap and Sundries (order from Heidi at Vintage Fresh Soap and Sundries).
Homemade or all natural soap costs approximately $4.00 per bar which may seem more expensive than liquid soap at first glance. However, according to Heidi at Vintage Fresh Soaps, homemade soaps have more natural oils so people find they do not need to use as much hand or body moisturizers as a result. I use my bar soap to shave and no longer need to buy shaving cream. I am going to ask my husband to give it a try this week when he shaves his face.
I like the fact that I can use bar soap for more than one purpose. I have also really enjoyed talking to the makers of each of the soaps I mentioned above. I feel good knowing I am supporting a living, breathing person with my purchase. It feels so basic and human and real.
So starting today I am going to put all of my liquid soap dispensers into a box a box and find some little dishes laying around I can use to hold a bar of soap at each sink. Soap is the perfect place to start my Grandma Challenges. I use it multiple times throughout the day. It will remind me to keep asking What Would Grandma Do?
Please send me a comment if you are going to try to switch to bar soap. Let me know if you find a bar soap you like and send in your stories - your own or your grandparents! I will let you know how I am doing with the bar soap switch over the coming weeks.
Hi April,
Happy birthday!! I hope it was a great one. May you have a wonderful, rich year ahead.
I never bought a soap dispenser, for all the reasons you state. I hate plastic things anyway, and love bars of good soap. I have been using homemade soaps for about 10 or so years now, and also the occasional bar of really lovely French bath soap, fruity glycerin soaps for the kitchen sink, and those wonderful little cheap bars of sandalwood and ginseng soap from China and India in the health food stores. The Body Shop fruit scented soaps were favorites of mine years ago, too, when I lived in Chicago–do they still make those?
Handmade soaps are messier and meltier than commercial soaps. It’s good to stand them on end in the soap dish so they stay drier; it’s hard to get small children to accomplish this balancing act, however. So I would be on the lookout for cheap glass soap dishes that have those ridges in them; they keep the soap out of the soapy water. I think mine may have come from Target some time ago; World Market also has some nice little dishes that I use as soap dishes; old dishes of any kind that you find attractive work well. I have one little dish of blue china from a thrift shop that reminds me of my great grandma’s ice cream dishes, and I use that for soap. You can get those little nylon or plastic grid things too, to put in the soap dish so the bar can dry out.
On Sundays there’s now an artisan Market in the GR Farmer’s Market. There are usually a few soap makers there. Last weekend one had a basket full of soaps on sale for $1 a bar…I stocked up! You may want to check that out next Sunday!
April,
Here’s a bar-soap trick that we used when we lived “in the bush” and have kept using here in GR:
Have you ever received a little mesh bag full of mints at a wedding, or bought something cute packaged in one of those little baggies? The kind with a ribbon drawstring around the top? Save them for your leftover soap pieces, or squeeze a full bar into one if the bar is small enough (or, for that matter, cut the bar in half so it fits in). The soap pieces will all goo together when it gets wet. You can tie the bag onto your faucet and let it hang in your sink. It’s right there when you need it. Because it stays damp, it’ll smear onto your hands easily, which is good for kids that wash their hands in 2.5 seconds. It’s also great to keep one of these in the shower.
I tried making some out of cotton cloth, but it was too soggy and the soap didn’t ooze out of the tighter cloth like it does out of the mesh. (And then a rat got into our washroom in Kankalabe and ate through the cloth to get to the soap. And that was the end of that!)
Marie
Happy B-day!
Another quick tip to avoid the mess. Put a few pretty stones in the soap dish to rest the soap on. It cuts down on the mess and you can run them through the dishwasher in the silverware rack (or handwash them like grandma
Love the new site.
Natasha
Hi April,
Happy Belated Birthday!
I just switched to bar soap a few months ago. Like you said it is a bit more messy, but I think worth it in the long run in terms of reducing waste. Plus there aren’t all those chemicals added which worries me from a health standpoint.
Emily
Hi April,
I’ve enjoyed following your blog. This is definitely an area I am very interested in. I’ve also started to use more natural bar soaps for fear of all the strange ingredients in liquid soaps. I pulled out a bar of soap, given as a gift years ago, from Aveda. It has rosemary and mint as does their signature line and smells great and gives your skin a tingly feel. I’ve read some earth friendly consumer report card (the name escapes me right now) that they were graded very well in all areas of being socially responsible, green, etc.
Of course, buying directly from the farmer is the best option.:)
Keep up the great work!
Tegan
I too have switched to bar soaps - except that I’m using up the liquid soap we have left in the kitchen. Once that’s gone, it’s all bar, baby.
We get ours from the farmers market so, like yours, it is locally made, made by someone who has a small business and has virtually no packaging. Of course, the bar at my kids’ sink is really nasty. They like to dig their fingernails into it and pick at it when they are washing their hands. I don’t know why!! But other than that, it’s been working wonderfully and, like most changes we’ve made that our grandparents also would have made, it feels more real.
Do you know what I mean? It feels more meaningful to wipe one’s mouth with a cloth napkin than a paper one. More real to clean up a mess with cloth instead of paper towels. More authentic to hang ones clothes up to dry. I find that so many of these changes reconnect us with ourselves.
Thanks for posting a link to my shop April! Its great to see how many people are already switching to handmade soap.
ohhh…look what your website is making me do…I need to find an alternative to my liquid soap here in Nigeria. : ) I’m not so sure the bar soap will be as natural as your options at the Farmer’s Market…soaps are pretty harsh here. Beware that I’m going to be asking you if you have any recipes for making soap next time we skype. ; )
love the way you are challenging yourself and your audience! will be adding a link to your site once I get back on our blogspot. can’t wait to show you a picture of how grandma might have washed clothes, got a tricep workout, and potty trained on a saturday afternoon.
I just bought my first two bars of locally made soap at the farmer’s market last week. I love them! So I’ve switched in the bath but haven’t mad the switch at the sinks yet. We switched to all natural liquids when I first became aware of the potentially harmful ingredients in the anti-bacterial stuff we were using. Now I’m becoming aware of the packaging…
I make my own soap. It is beyond easy to do and is inexpensive. Give it a try.