Today's Soap (15/3/2026)
Soapbox: The humble bar of soap used to define the American way.
I love that bar soap isn’t sold for $11.79 in a giant plastic bottle that will still be lying in a landfill when the sun explodes.
[1600s middle-class life in London] The majority, who mostly lacked easy access to fresh, warm water—or private bathrooms to use it—rarely washed, and almost never experienced a full-body immersion. If you felt the need to scrub a body part, you filled a pot with cold water and applied it selectively.
As the new century progressed, a new incentive appeared for soap manufacturers to increase production: world war. One byproduct of the soapmaking process is glycerin. Once a waste chemical, glycerin had become valuable after Alfred Nobel pioneered the manufacture of the explosive nitroglycerin. With America’s entry into World War I, demand for explosives, and thus for glycerin, skyrocketed. As Shiqi Wang, a scholar of environmental history at Stony Brook University, explained to me, this upended the industry. “Soap itself became a kind of byproduct rather than the primary product,” Wang said. Procter & Gamble was suddenly a government-regulated weapons manufacturer, supplying a third of the glycerin made in the U.S. in 1918, Wang pointed out.
It seemed to me, as I thought about it there in the shower, pinier than I’d ever been, that washing my body—my actual self—is a more private act even than brushing my teeth or putting on deodorant. In the shower I am communing with myself, giving precious attention to my physical form in all its glory: every chest hair, every weird mole, every farmer’s tan line. The act of washing, repetitive and ritualistic, is meditative, and spurs a sort of reverie. Here I am, I am reminding myself.
Body wash is a “syndet”—a synthetic detergent, which unlike many soaps often derives its cleansing power from petroleum byproducts.