Let me begin by stating categorically that I am not a historian, although I do enjoy reading about it. I’ve made every effort to present a brief outline of the evolution in soap making, and since this isn’t intended to be an exhaustive resource on the topic, it won’t include all soap making milestones. This topic is fascinating to me because soap is such a common commodity in our modern world, but this has not always been the case. Moreover, soap making has not always been a particularly “clean” business.
To begin, it is important to understand what soap is, and how it is made. The simplest explanation is actually a chemistry explanation but please don’t run away screaming just yet:
Lye (Salts of Alkali) + Fats/Oils (Fatty Acids) = Soap & Glycerin
The resulting chemical reaction that occurs upon combining lye and fats/oils is called saponification. Our predecessors didn’t have the benefit of modern chemistry, much less a stick blender (something that comes in very handy in modern soap making). It is also reasonable to speculate that the discovery of soap was quite accidental and may have occurred much further back in history than one might think.
The earliest known example is believed to have been around 2800 b.c. A soap-like material was found in clay cylinders dating from ancient Babylonia. Inscriptions on those cylinders describe boiling fats and ashes together (a crude type of making soap). The ancient Egyptians were also versed in the process of soap making. This is evidenced by the discovery of the Ebers Papyrus dating from 1550 b.c. (acquired by Georg Ebers in the winter of 1973-74). It is a medical papyrus describing herbal use in medicine including information about the use of vegetable and animal fats with salts of alkali. The use of this product apparently fell out of fashion however, as it is well documented that Egyptians in the time of Cleopatra (69 b.c.-30 b.c.) used oils and fine sand, among other things, to bathe with rather than soap. It is also well known that the Romans around this same time did not use soap to bathe, but rather used oil and a scraping instrument called a “strigil” to scrap the dirt and oil from their bodies. However, soap made a reappearance at some point during the Roman Empire, as stories abound about the discovery of soap at Mount Sapos as a result of fats from sacrificed animals washing down the mountain along with the ashes from the sacrificial fires, thus creating a soapy material. Another story suggests that the Romans learned about soap making from Britain during their occupancy of that region.
While the first date and place of soap making can be vigorously debated, it is well documented that the use of soap took a big nose-dive with the fall of the Roman Empire. This may suggest that an absence of soap, in addition to widespread feudal warring, may have played a role in the prevalence of filthy living conditions and rampant disease, including the Black Plague which was responsible for millions of deaths worldwide. Soap appears to have made a rather big comeback sometime after the 7th century a.d. with merchants along the “Silk Road”, a historically important trade route between the Mediterranean and China (and everywhere in between).
Although there are at least two very famous and ancient soaps which remain popular to this day. Aleppo Soap is one of them and is so named for the city in Syria from which it hails. The city of Aleppo is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world and the tradition of Aleppo soap making is reported to go back around 2000 years. Aleppo soap contains just three ingredients – olive oil, laurel oil and lye. Another very old and famous soap that continues in modern soaping is Castile soap which was made primarily in Italy, Spain & France, but named after the city of Castile in Spain. Castile soap is made with just two ingredients – olive oil and lye. Both Aleppo soap (which is technically classified as a type of Castile soap) and 100% olive oil Castile soap are both known for being extremely mild.
Soap has had lots of ups and downs throughout history, but one of the strangest and perhaps “dirtiest” eras began in England in 1638 when King Charles I created a soap making monopoly (the corporation of soap boilers) and a soap tax was instituted. Shockingly, this “dirty” revenue generating practice continued for over 200 years. 1852 was the last year the soap tax was collected. While there was undoubtedly a black market for soap during that dark time, soap was considered a high-end luxury item and not something that would have been readily accessible to the average person.
Another interesting development came in the 20th century in the shadow of two world wars. Rationing and the need for oil to perpetuate war efforts, along with big developments in chemistry, had a profound effect on modern soap making. Specifically, the development of synthetic detergents. Detergents revolutionized commercial soap making and this is where things get really “slippery”. Commercial soap makers began to make and sell detergent-based products but continued to call those products “soap”. Detergents (aka synthetic surfactants) are very effective degreasers. So effective, in fact, that they are often used to degrease waterfowl that have been the unfortunate victims of massive oil spills (think Dawn® dishwashing liquid and penguins after the terrible Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989). However, I’m just not sure that my own aging skin needs to be degreased that much, least of all by means of synthetic surfactants. So, if we rule out detergent based “soaps” as our desired personal bath product and look at commercial soaps that are real soap, we discover that many of those have had the glycerin extracted out of them. These types of “soaps” still aren’t quite what my poor dry skin craves.
Enter the realm of handcrafted soap making. My skin loves real soap and I love the nearly infinite number of color and fragrance combinations. Of course, synthetic detergent surfactants have a place, I just don’t generally care to bathe with them (unless I happen to fall into an oil slick). This is one of the reasons I created Smellum Goodies handcrafted bath & body bistro and it is my privilege to offer wonderful and great smelling handcrafted real soaps and other luxurious bath and body products to others. I hope you’ll give them a try. Happy bubbles!