What is the essential difference between shampoo, body wash, and a soap bar or liquid?
Can they all be used interchangeably? and if not why not?
I honesly can’t tell you - sort of.
Personally? At home mrAru and I use Dr Bronners soap for our body, it is a ‘castile soap’ not a detergent [it is roughly speaking a fat and lye rather than a witches brew of chemicals] and various shampoos. When traveling, I tend to use my shampoo as body soap if I dont like the smell of the hotel soap, otherwise we use the hotel soap.
When I was in Germany last spring, the guy I was staying with bought a single product that was shampoo and body wash [and a very yummy vanilla scent as well] and it worked just fine. And no I dont condition my hair, it doesnt get washed every day just very thoroughly brushed and washed twice a week.
I have used Dr Bronners on my hair, and it worked just fine, though we use the tea tree version and I am not as thrilled with the scent as I like the way that the Paul Mitchel Tea Tree shampoo smells. IF I had to chop costs to a serious bare minimum [the way it is starting to look] I would simply eliminate buying shampoo and just use the Dr Bronners.
Dr. Bronner’s rocks, I clean my whole house with it - but I don’t really like the way it makes my skin feel, and it dried my hair when I tried to use it as a shampoo. Fantastic for mopping the floor, though, I tell you what.
I don’t really have anything to add except that the Philosophy body washes all say they are also shampoos, and I have used them as such and been very pleased with the results. I normally use an Aveda shampoo and conditioner, though.
Soap is a sodium salt of fatty acids, produced by reacting sodium hydroxide - lye - with fat. It’s an ancient process, and soaps were used to clean everything up until around World War II.
Shampoo and body wash are detergents, which (despite being a “witches’ brew” of chemicals) are perfectly safe and really no further from actual natural precursors than soap. Many bar “soaps” are actually detergents anyway. But that’s the fundamental chemical difference.
In terms of how they can be interchanged, I wouldn’t use bar soap on my hair, since bar soap remains substantially alkaline even when the saponification reaction is done. Alkaline cleansers tend to be bad for your hair, causing the cuticle - the overlapping plates on the outside of the hair shaft - to puff up, which can add an appearance of volume but will tend to create frizziness and damage your hair over time. In fact, the ammonia or other strong bases in hair dyes are there in part to push that process to its logical extreme, causing the cuticle to lift so much that chemicals can easily penetrate the hair’s interior.
On the other hand, shampoo and body wash aren’t fundamentally different at all. They’re both thick detergent solutions, and the differences are minor at most. I’ve never had any particular problem using one in place of the other when I run out, although shampoo tends to foam more and doesn’t rinse away as easily. Both shampoos and body washes tend to contain some sort of conditioning agents, emollient chemicals that moisturize your hair or skin; if you use a particularly heavily moisturizing body wash on your hair, it might potentially cause buildup. But there’s no reason a product couldn’t be formulated or sold for both purposes, and you can find a few of them out there. Really, probably most shampoos or body washes would work fine for the other purpose even if you did it on a daily basis.
Excalibre, I’ve heard it said that dish detergent will really do the same job as shampoo, at a fraction of the price. Is that true as well? Also, as regards your contention that shampoo is perfectly safe, I’ve read recently that many shampoos contain phthalates, some types of which have been banned in Europe, at least for kids’ toys. Do you know anything about that?
Dish detergent isn’t really fundamentally different, but it’s got much stronger detergents, which is why it gives you dishpan hands. It’ll dry your hair out something fierce as well - in fact, I know people use it to help wash out semi-perm hair dyes.
If you disagree with my “contention” that shampoo is safe, isn’t it incumbent on you to demonstrate that it’s not? I know it’s popular to reflexively assume that we can divide things into “natural” and “unnatural” and everything “unnatural” is incredibly dangerous, but that doesn’t mean it’s a useful way to look at the world. I’ve never heard about shampoo containing phthalates, though the health consequences of them are fairly well-studied. But that doesn’t mean that the brief exposure you get to some minor quantity in your shampoo will hurt you - the fear with phthalates is mostly developmental to my knowledge and I believe the specific concerns with children’s toys are related to kids sticking things in their mouths. Do you have evidence that there’s a significant quantity in your shampoo? And - for that matter - that there isn’t in other products?
Excalibre, I didn’t mean anything invidious here. I know there’s a lot of controversy about whether phthalates are safe or not, and I’ve also read that they’re commonly added to shampoo. That’s the sum total of what I know, and I wondered whether you had any additional perspective here on why phthalates might be added to shampoo, and what the quantities involved were. Even acknowledging that the jury is still out on the danger of phthalates, it seemed to me that if you could avoid them (and save money) by washing your hair with Palmolive, that might be the right thing to do. But of course not at the price of dishpan hair.
I’m not aware of any phthalates commonly added to shampoo, which doesn’t mean they’re not there - just that there’s nothing conveniently labeled, you know, diethyl phthalate on the bottle.
LOL, I dont particularly claim to be a treehugger that thinks ‘better living through modern chemistry’ is particularly bad, it is more a case of why change from my Dr Bronners [which I have noticed rinses off easier than a detergent, and doesnt seem to make my body oils/skin cells/assorted crud leave a particularly nasty deposit when combined with the fairly hard water from our well. ] if there is no particular reason to? As I noted, I use a commercial shampoo, though with as infrequently [comparatively speaking] as I wash my hair the castile soap wouldn’t give me a case of the frizzies [when particularly broke at various times in my life I have forgone shampoo and used castile soap for everything including hand washing clothing =)] Although I do note that when out of the castile soap and using shampoo as a body wash, deposits are left when combined with the hard water.
Honestly, along with that thread about the olive oil soaps, if a simpler and typically less expensive product works as well as a modern detergent, why bother changing? FWIW, diet is another area that simpler is better [and i dont see many people arguing that they really need those preservatives and funkified modified food components in their diet to remain healthy as compared with fresh fruits, veggies, meats, legumes and grains used more or less whole.] I can understand going with premade crap if you seriously cant cook, have no cooking facilities beyond a microwave oven or a job/school that leaves you with minimal time to putz in a kitchen - but actually preferring crap food to the real deal mystifies me.
The biggest danger from using body wash is accidentally dropping the bottle on your foot. OUCH!!! :eek: