Liquid soap?

[lethargic_man]

When I was growing up in the seventies and eighties, we didn't have liquid soap. I don't know whether this was because it was less available or popular then, or just reflective of my mother's preference, but I was raised with an association that soap formed solid bars.

Nowadays I go to other people's houses and I see an assortment of bottles of glistening ooze, and need to carefully check the labels before using any to make sure I'm applying something capable of lysing bacteria to my hand, and not just moisturiser. And to make things worse, liquid soap bottles are never labelled "soap"; they've always got a convoluted and indirect description instead. "Handwash" is about the simplest they ever get. What's wrong with just "soap"?

Not only that, but liquid soap is inherently delivered in an environmentally unfriendly manner: whilst soap bars are packaged in waxed paper wrappers, or at worst a thin plastic film, liquid soap requires a thick plastic bottle. All being well, the bottle can be recycled, but wouldn't it be better not to require packaging made from fossil fuels in the first place?

Bah; liquid soap? I wash my hands of it!

Comments

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

In fairness, you can buy liquid soap in bulk containers and refill the smaller squirters in the kitchen and the bathroom: that way, you avoid the waste associated with the last slivers of 'proper' soap disintegrating or liquefying and disappearing.

Of courae, most households just say: "Sud that" and replace the overpriced splot-pots in the weekly shop.

[michael koplow (from livejournal.com)]

I essentially agree with Lethargic. Liquid soap, at least in the greater Chicago area, is used by us Orthodox on Shabbat so that we don't change the shape of the soap bars. My youthful experience, which was a few decades longer ago than his, is the same. Solid bars. I wonder what Orthos did decades ago. (I wasn't an Ortho then.) Maybe liquid hand soap was sold by manufacturers who sold only to the Ortho market, maybe they used dish detergent. Maybe, being less whatever-the-tactful-adj-might-be than today's Orthos, they just used bars of soap.

Hairyears, you're quite right about the deluxe barrels of liquid soap. This way you only need one small bottle, and it minimizes, but doesn't eliminate, the wastage. And you don't need to get rid of the soap chips. Before they get that small, you can just stick them to the new bar of soap.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

I don't know what the frum Orthodox did years ago, but if you took today's frummers and sent them back in time to before the invention of liquid soap, I suspect they'd dissolve solid soap in hot water before Shabbos and leave it as a gelatinous mess for use on Shabbos...

[curious-reader.livejournal.com]

I also grew up in the 70s and 80s. Although I was younger than you and I can at least remember the 80s. Shampoo was always available in bottles as far I know but not soap. The liquid soap is not really soap. I looked at the incrediences. It is mixture of a lot of chemical stuff and some of them have palm oil in it as well as shampoo. It is not necessarily environmental friendly to produce palm oil as I heard the rain forest has to suffer for it. It depends where they make it. You never know where it is coming from. The worst I agree are the plastic bottles but that applies for any drinks and water you buy in plastic bottles or the other drink packages. They are not for recycle. I saw in a documentary that (I think it was) the Mauritius islands where they cannot recycle plastic bottles. They made an island where they store all the rubbish the tourists bring along that cannot be recycled. The hotel itself provides ceramic bottles for soap and shampoo. Bringing shampoo bottles and so forth is not necessary.