{"id":20597,"date":"2020-05-12T23:48:24","date_gmt":"2020-05-12T23:48:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=20597"},"modified":"2020-05-15T14:18:59","modified_gmt":"2020-05-15T14:18:59","slug":"the-dirty-history-of-soap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/the-dirty-history-of-soap\/","title":{"rendered":"The dirty history of soap"},"content":{"rendered":"

Judith Ridner<\/a>, Mississippi State University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cWash your hands often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds<\/a>.\u201d That\u2019s what the CDC has advised all Americans to do to prevent the spread of COVID-19 during this pandemic.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s common-sense advice. The surfactants found in soap lift germs from the skin<\/a>, and water then washes them away. Soap is inexpensive and ubiquitous; it\u2019s a consumer product found in every household across the country.<\/p>\n

Yet few people know the long and dirty history of making soap, the product we all rely on to clean our skin. I\u2019m a historian who focuses on material culture<\/a> in much of my research. As I started digging into what\u2019s known about soap\u2019s use in the past, I was surprised to discover its messy origins.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
From animal fat to coal tar, what goes in tends to be pretty dirty.<\/span>
\nSeM\/Universal Images Group via Getty Images<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Gross ingredients to clean things up<\/h2>\n

Ancient Mesopotamians were first to produce<\/a> a kind of soap by cooking fatty acids \u2013 like the fat rendered from a slaughtered cow, sheep or goat \u2013 together with water and an alkaline like lye<\/a>, a caustic substance derived from wood ashes. The result was a greasy and smelly goop that lifted away dirt.<\/p>\n

An early mention of soap comes in Roman scholar Pliny the Elder\u2019s<\/a> book \u201cNaturalis Historia<\/a>\u201d from A.D. 77. He described soap as a pomade made of tallow \u2013 typically derived from beef fat \u2013 and ashes that the Gauls, particularly the men, applied to their hair to give it \u201ca reddish tint.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
A strigil and flask.<\/span>
\nHeritage Images\/Hulton Archive via Getty Images<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Ancient people used these early soaps to clean wool or cotton fibers before weaving them into cloth, rather than for human hygiene. Not even the Greeks and Romans, who pioneered running water and public baths, used soap to clean their bodies<\/a>. Instead, men and women immersed themselves in water baths and then smeared their bodies with scented olive oils. They used a metal or reed scraper called a strigil<\/a> to remove any remaining oil or grime.<\/p>\n

By the Middle Ages, new vegetable-oil-based soaps, which were hailed for their mildness and purity and smelled good, had come into use as luxury items among Europe\u2019s most privileged classes. The first of these, Aleppo soap, a green, olive-oil-based bar soap<\/a> infused with aromatic laurel oil, was produced in Syria and brought to Europe by Christian crusaders and traders.<\/p>\n

French, Italian, Spanish and eventually English versions soon followed. Of these, Jabon de Castilla<\/a>, or Castile soap, named for the region of central Spain where it was produced, was the best known. The white, olive-oil-based bar soap was a wildly popular toiletry item among European royals. Castile soap became a generic term for any hard soap of this type<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The settlement of the American colonies coincided with an age (1500s-1700s) when most Europeans, whether privileged or poor, had turned away from regular bathing out of fear that water actually spread disease<\/a>. Colonists used soap primarily for domestic cleaning, and soap-making was part of the seasonal domestic routine overseen by women.<\/p>\n

As one Connecticut woman described it in 1775<\/a>, women stored fat from butchering, grease from cooking and wood ashes over the winter months. In the spring, they made lye from the ashes and then boiled it with fat and grease in a giant kettle. This produced a soft soap that women used to wash the linen shifts that colonists wore as undergarments<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In the new nation, the founding of soap manufactories like New York-based Colgate, founded in 1807<\/a>, or the Cincinnati-based Procter & Gamble, founded in 1837<\/a>, increased the scale of soap production but did little to alter its ingredients or use. Middle-class Americans had resumed water bathing, but still shunned soap<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Soap-making remained an extension of the tallow trade<\/a> that was closely allied with candle making. Soap itself was for laundry. At the first P&G factory, laborers used large cauldrons to boil down fat collected from homes, hotels and butchers<\/a> to make the candles and soap they sold.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Workers tended to soap in large tanks in a French factory circa 1870.<\/span>
\nUniversal History Archive\/Universal Images Group via Getty Images<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

From cleaning objects to cleaning bodies<\/h2>\n

The Civil War was the watershed<\/a>. Thanks to reformers who touted regular washing with water and soap as a sanitary measure to aid the Union war effort, bathing for personal hygiene caught on. Demand for inexpensive toilet soaps increased<\/a> dramatically among the masses.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Palmolive ads, like this one from 1900, stressed the exotic ingredients in the green bar.<\/span>
\nLibrary of Congress Prints and Photographs Division<\/a>, CC BY<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Companies began to develop and market a variety of new products to consumers. In 1879, P&G introduced Ivory soap<\/a>, one of the first perfumed toilet soaps in the U.S. B.J. Johnson Soap Company of Milwaukee followed with their own palm-and-olive-oil-based Palmolive soap<\/a> in 1898. It was the world\u2019s best-selling soap by the early 1900s<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Soap chemistry also began to change, paving the way for the modern era. At P&G, decades of laboratory experiments<\/a> with imported coconut and palm oil, and then with domestically produced cottonseed oil, led to the discovery of hydrogenated fats in 1909<\/a>. These solid, vegetable-based fats revolutionized soap by making its manufacture less dependent on animal byproducts. Shortages of fats and oils for soap<\/a> during World Wars I and II also led to the discovery of synthetic detergents as a \u201csuperior\u201d substitute<\/a> for fat-based laundry soaps, household cleaners and shampoos.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s commercially manufactured soaps are highly specialized<\/a>, lab-engineered products. Synthesized animal fats and plant-based oils and bases are combined with chemical additives<\/a>, including moisturizers, conditioners, lathering agents, colors and scents, to make soaps more appealing to the senses. But they cannot fully mask its mostly foul ingredients, including shower gels\u2019<\/a> petroleum-based contents.<\/p>\n

As a 1947 history of P&G observed: \u201cSoap is a desperately ordinary substance to us<\/a>.\u201d As unremarkable as it is during normal times, soap has risen to prominence during this pandemic.<\/p>\n

[Get facts about coronavirus and the latest research.<\/em> Sign up for The Conversation\u2019s newsletter.<\/a>]\"The<\/p>\n

Judith Ridner<\/a>, Professor of History, Mississippi State University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Judith Ridner, Mississippi State University \u201cWash your hands often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds.\u201d That\u2019s what the CDC has advised all Americans to do to prevent the spread of COVID-19 during this pandemic. It\u2019s common-sense advice. The surfactants found in soap lift germs from the skin, and water then washes them […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":20598,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[293],"tags":[8060,5665,8061,6964,8058,5739,6815,3694,191,6404,8059],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20597"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20597"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20597\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20626,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20597\/revisions\/20626"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}