I do this for hand soap: Dawn soap to water. It works, but I wish I could bulk/gel it up a bit - it’s so thin. Suggestions? Glycerin?
PS: why do you add salt to soap? What’s the advantage? Thanks.
Yeah, I still use Dial and Irish Spring regularly, as well as Safeguard, Zest, and Lever 2000 on occasion. I can get Ivory and Kirk’s Coconut castile, but they both dry me out something fierce most of the time.
My wife uses Dove- there are 3 or 4 variants of it commonly available - pink, white, unscented, and some others that seem to have honey and other stuff in them.
The main difference is that soaps react with the minerals in hard water, and create stuff like magnesium stearate or calcium stearate, which are what causes soap scum. Detergents don’t react like that, so no scum. In terms of their surfactant duties, they largely operate the same.
Probably some woo about how it’s nourishing to the skin or something. I’d bet that the soap itself is probably made from regular old fats like beef tallow, olive oil, soybean oil, and lye, like other solid soaps. The goat milk is almost certainly an additive- you can’t make soap out of it straight- not enough fat.
The ingredients for the goat milk soap I use are
Sodium Palmate, Sodium Cocoate and/or Palm Kernelate, Water, Glycerin, Goat Milk, Disodium Cocoyl Glutamate, Sodium Cocoyl Glutamate, Sodium Cocoyl Threoninate, Sodium Chloride, Pentasodium Pentetate, Tetrasodium Etidronate.
So palm oil before goat milk. (And I’m not very happy that they use palm oil given the negative impact of its cultivation.)
Palm oil, coconut oil and/or palm kernel oil before goat’s milk. Sodium palmate, sodium cocoate, sodium palm kernelate are all the actual soap, and the glycerin is another product of the fat + lye reaction that produces the soap.
Those glutamates & threoninate are probably part of something like this, meant to improve lathering. They’re derived from coconut oil.
I’m not a chemist, i just found a bunch of recipes on line and then played with them to find what worked for me. My sense is that salt makes the result feel slicker and thicker, rinse better, and keeps the stuff fresh over long storage periods. But take that with a grain . . .
I’d guess lard and lye. The one time i made soap (at camp) those were the ingredients.
That could very well be too. The only thing I know about soap making is that I have found someone who makes what so I don’t have to do it myself. And that I adore her for always having unscented for me.
I have a very frugal friend who used to have me save all my leftover bacon grease for her to use to make soap (unscented). I didn’t have to buy soap for years.
I hang up my washcloth after one use (on a drying rack in another room). The next day I take a fresh washcloth. At the end of the week the towel, 7 washclothes, etc. go in the wash.
I’ve inherited my mother’s tendency towards exzema and have problems with contact dermatitis. Her doctor told her that Ivory is one of the worst soaps to use with her skin. I don’t do most scented products, nor shea butter or lanolin. Fun times.
I use a skin cleanser* created and manufactured here in Switzerland. When I am in the U.S. I use either Cetaphil Gentle Cleanser or Cerave cleanser.
On the product I use here, it is specifically written “to be used the same as liquid soap”. The products are more expensive, but my skin is a lot happier.
Ever so often I’ll there will be a bar soap I like in a hotel, and I’ll bring it home for washing my hands, but not for my body. Most bar soaps end up melting at some point and I end up throwing it away. Not useful.
I buy bar soap Irish Spring from a seller on Amazon, twenty four bars at a time. My gf has several pump dispensers for girl-soap in her shower. I totally don’t get that.
Irish Spring has a really obnoxious STRONG scent for me. Goes up my nose and gives me a headache.
Totally with you on this one! To me, liquid ‘hand soap’ feels like coating my hands with heating oil, and takes just about as long to wash off. Yuck.
You only need maybe a teaspoon or so to get a lather on your hands. Sounds like you’re using way too much.
I use a lot less than a teaspoon of I’m just washing my hands. Or did you mean for a shower?
Yeah, I guess it’s more like half that amount. A teaspoon would more likely be the right amount for a shower.
I just couldn’t imagine using so much soap that it took a long time to rinse off (or felt like motor oil?).
To each his own, but those moisturizing soaps drive me nuts, especially in the shower. I remember after I was grown up and out of the house, when I’d go to visit my mom, she’d have bars of those moisturizing soaps in the guest bathroom. (We never had them at home, growing up.) I’d rinse and rinse and rinse, and the soap would still be clinging to me. That was my first encounter with these kinds of soaps, and I didn’t know what the deal was, but I couldn’t stand it.
Sometimes we stay at a hotel where the shower soap is moisturizing soap. I usually take along a bar or two of regular soap from home when we travel, but occasionally I forget, and it still creeps me out, but at least I know that’s what’s going on now. If we’re staying more than overnight, I’ll get some normal soap the next day.
My relationship with soap is very simple: I use the soap to get the dirt off, then I use water to get the soap off. I realize we’re not all the same and obviously there are a lot of people who really like those moisturizing soaps, and that’s fine, but just don’t spring them on me.
You wash your hands with a scrunchie?
I’m not trying to give you a hard time, I’m just trying to understand. The main place I encounter liquid soap is in addition to or in lieu of bar soap at a sink.
Switching gears here, I keep a small bar of soap at the kitchen sink, in addition to the liquid soap my wife has a bottle of there. When cleaning pots and pans, the liquid soap she prefers does a piss-poor job of cutting through any grease that’s gotten on my hands. A bar of Safeguard does the job just fine.
To be honest, I had no memory that body washes were moisterizing. I had to look up what it means, which apparently is a term used for soap substitutes that don’t dry out your skin. So it’s preventative more than performative, I think. I have dry skin, and that’s a pain. Soaps, i.e. detergents, do dry out skin.
Here’s a seemingly neutral site:
That makes sense, and I suspect that’s one of those things where the effects vary a great deal for different people. The skin on most of my body feels just fine in terms of moisture level, but ten or twelve years ago, I started applying moisturizing lotion on my hands before bed in the wintertime, and 3-4 years ago, I went to using it year-round.
The weird thing is, my face started getting oilier sometime in my late 50s, and I wash my face four or five times a day on account of that. I even get the occasional zit, which I hadn’t had for decades. (Excuse me, skin, but what’s with this teenage crap? Don’t you realize you’re nearly 70 years old? I’ve heard of ‘second childhood,’ but this is more like ‘second adolescence.’ 
)
The bar soap in the bathroom at my local bar, is a liquid.