My hairdresser has a conditioner made from placenta. Does anyone remember SNL’s “ad” for Placenta Helper?
When I was growing up some people used lard to clean their faces, so I am told.
While we’re using human fat for useful things, how practical is human fat for the manufacture of candles? How about cooking oil?
What about that liquid soap? I’m talking the real cheap industrial stuff that you’d find around an office sink? There are a couple of righteous vegans on my floor that use that stuff. I wonder if they know what’s in it?
So is this place.
<< Adjusts tinfoil hat …>>
That would be a no on the cooking oil. For one, oil isn’t made from animal fat. It’s made from things like olives and such-like. Besides, that would constitute cannibalism. Would you want your food to taste of humans?
But yes, I suppose you could make tallow candles out of human fat. Tho I imagine they wouldn’t be very good candles. I think the stuff is a bit too watery. Beef tallow is much thicker. Take it from a candlemaker.
But like soap, production would be impractical. Even with alot of willing donors, there wouldn’t be enough raw material to keep up production for long. Not to mention it would be illegal. As said before, human fat is considered a bio-hazard and by law must be disposed of properly. While the end-product wouldn’t pose a health risk, the raw fat would. I don’t know what the difference between that and other animal fats, but I’m sure there’s good reason it’s considered hazardous waste.
All legal, moral, health issues aside, how well would human fat soap work? Better because, uhhh, it’s from the same stuff? (which seems pretty hokey, since it’s supposed to take off dirt, from the outside) Worse because of, uhhh, certain fat properties? (which I don’t really have anything to elaborate on, but wanted to continue the pattern)
I have heard that the Nazis made soap from the fat of the prisoners bodies in their concentration camps. Does anyone know if this is true or not?
Not enough human fat available? Look around the Midwest, pal. 
FAT + NaOH (Caustic Soda) ----> Soap + Glycerin (The soap obtained by this is not good for the skin). This reaction requires heat.
Common method for soap therefore is
FAT + KOH (Potassium Hydroxide) —> Soap + Glycerin.
Note that Glycerin is a by-product (or a product depending if the soap plant is selling to an explosives plant).
Any FAT is good enough to make Soap. Cocunut oil soaps give Sodium Palmitate. Stearate is also from vegetable origin.
The soap I think will pose no biohazard. It will chemically degrade all organisms.
Someone asked for coconut cooking oil - try looking for it in a Thai / Indian Grocery Store.
Fat + casutic = soap
Ester + alkali base = metal salt of the ester = soap.
Soap is usually a sodium saldt of a long chain fatty acid such as octadecanoic acid.
This fatty acid is naturally present in animal fat, from which the first soaps were made.
As long as this fatty acid is a component of human fat, there is no chemical reason to suppose that soap from human fat would perform any differently than soap from animal fat.
As for cooking:
Oils for cooking which are derived from plant material are usually in liquid form at room temperature, whereas those derived from animal sources are solid at room temperature and are generally called fats.
People cook with lard and dripping which are solid animal fats, so if you had a quantity of whatever pig fat they use to make lard and treated your human fat the same way, you would probably get a solid fat that you could use for cooking.
Chemically, I dont see why not
Personally, no thankyouverymuch
An excellent BBC series called “Hollywood Science” tried this recently. They couldn’t get hold of any human fat despite numerous phone calls so used pig fat as well, which is pretty much indistinguishable considering pigs’ anatomy and diet. The result was a soap which worked but did not later up anywhere near as well as the cheapest supermarket brand.
Erratum: lather up, not “later up”.
Some of the more twisted Nazis did experiment with human fat and soap. These were the same guys who made a human-skin lampshade or two. However, it was not a widespread thing, only a few attempts at one experimental camp. But while axxagerated, the stories have more than fiction behind them.
Sounds like an interesting programme. How did they make their soap?
Originally soap was just fat and alkali.
Now soap is fat and alkali and hard water softeners and soft watrer hardeners and fagrances and and foaming agents and moisturisers and any number of extra additives to enhance performance.
If you took your human generated fatty acids and used them as the fat source in a commercial soap factory, adding all the other bits and pieces and performance enhancers, the results of the experiment would surely be far closer.
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I’m not sure I would describe Hollywood Science as ‘excellent’, although it’s a good format and is always entertaining.
IMHO, their item about soap was one of their less interesting efforts, as it is not at all surprising that you can make soap from fat. To be fair, they were actually trying to test the claim that human fat makes better soap than other types of fat and they came to the very predictable conclusion that it is all the additives that makes the real difference.
They have a couple of websites, although they don’t discuss the soap experiment in detail.
Nazis may have experimented with making soap from human fat, but the idea was discarded pretty quickly as economically unworkable. Go visit any website about the Holocaust and look at the pictures of the people from the camps. Not exactly a corpulent group, are they? The Nazis didn’t believe it was necessary to feed the people they were going to exterminate. Neither did they find it needful to feed the people they were using as slave labor. IOW, it was economically unsound to try to make soap from their remains because there wasn’t much raw material there with which to work.