Bar Soap vs Liquid Soap

Having a conversation with the misses, we got on the topic of bar soap vs liquid soap. My wife is an avid liquid soap user because that is how she was raised. I've utilized both liquid and bar soap and figure soap is soap. The conversation went to how much touching/contact goes with a bar of soap compared to the top of a dispenser and we ended up perplexed.

Bar soap has been used for quite a long time and "it works".  Liquid soap seems to be a newer thing but that doesn't necessarily mean it is any better.

Who can help explain the differences an similarities of soap to this poor fool?

I'm secretly hoping I can make a good argument for switching to locally produced bar soaps.

oh dear. in this house it is an ongoing debate.
I like bar soap because of the inherent lower costs in transport and no need for plastic bottles/pumps/etc. I also think that you have less risk of contamination touching a bar of soap than a dispenser.
My beloved family find bar soap icky, yucky and messy. To be fair, even with a bar soap drainer, there is often "gunk" that needs to be cleaned up.
Our solution is that in the shower we use a good bar soap and the bathroom sink has a liquid soap in a foaming dispenser (which helps us stretch it much farther). If it were just me I'd probably use the same homemade lye soap for everything from hair to dishes to laundry, but ... diplomacy.

(i can't help remarking, on a slightly different note, that on my last few trips up to the US I have been shocked at the lack of bar soap variety for bathing in big-box stores. There were maybe 3 brands, compared to all the great ones I remember. It's all about the shower gel now, apparently. thank goodness for artisan stuff!)

I make liquid soap from bar soap. 32 ounce container of liquid soap. When empty, shave a bar of soap and put pieces into the bottle with warm water and let it melt. Makes perfect liquid soap and lasts much, much longer than the bar of soap would have.
One bar of soap is too much for one 32 ounce bottle, so as it thickens I have to add more water to keep it liquid enough for the pump to work. I think liquid soap is just a tricky way to get people to pay way too much for soap.

As I understand it, bar soap might not be older. Castille soap is made from olive oil and potash, and it takes a liquid form. Potash is much easier to obtain than lye, as it comes from wood ash.

I don’t use soap typically except on my hands but sometimes wash off with an herbal/medicinal infusion of some sort if I feel the need, which is liquid but homemade and not packaged. Another source of “soap” is the wild soapwort, which grows on river edges, disturbed habitats, & roadsides. They can be used like bar soap—rubbed until they start to release their soap-filled juices and then used for washing. You probably have seen them around—big white five-petalled flowers, opposite leaves with conspicuous veins.

Hi, It seems that bar soaps do harbor some bacteria. In one study all 32 bars tester grew 2-5 different genera of micro organisms (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17051871/).

But the good thing is that it doesn't seem to matter. In an older study from 1988 they found that none of the 16 test subject had detectable levels of either Escherichia coli nor Pseudomonas aeruginosa, after washing with soaps that had had that added to them (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2249330/). Similar results in an earlier study by Bannan & Judge in 1965. These are old studies, but maybe they will be persuasive?

Soap, is designed to lift the dirt of your hands anyway. But I do personally keep a bar for showering and liquid for washing my hands after the toilet. Now that I think about it, it's mostly to make guests feel welcome, because not everyone wants to use wet soap bars.

M Ljin wrote:Another source of “soap” is the wild soapwort, which grows on river edges, disturbed habitats, & roadsides. They can be used like bar soap—rubbed until they start to release their soap-filled juices and then used for washing. You probably have seen them around—big white five-petalled flowers, opposite leaves with conspicuous veins.

This sounds interesting. Haven't heard about soapwort before. Quickly read that parts of the plant is usually boiled to get "sopa water".

We're another household that has him and her soaps: he likes the liquid soap, whereas I think as Teresa says that you're paying for mostly packaging and water, so use the bar soap for hand washing. We are at least able to refill our bottle from our own bulk dispenser in our shop (available for customers too). We also use the bar soap in the bath. At the moment we are going through all the nice soap bars gifted to us over the years...I think we'll not need to buy one for a long time yet!

We also have his & hers. I have allergies to so many things in commercial soaps, that I've just given up. Bar soaps travel better, which is very important, when dealing with allergies. I take my own tiny bar of soap, whenever we go anywhere, so I won't have to use what is available in public bathrooms or those of friends & family. I also prefer to not have all the bottles, packaging, & shipping, so my soap is either made by me or a local friend, who also makes soaps that are friendly to me. If I make it, I'm using mostly fats that I've rendered from scraps from food we processed, but not always entirely. I've not made my own lye - yet.

He uses what he uses for his own reasons...

We use a bar of Bronners in the shower -- we buy all their "flavors" and cycle through them semi-randomly. We have some liquid soap on the bathroom vanities (I think that's also a Bronners product, but it's kind of my wife's deal). At the kitchen sink, we have two hand-pumps in the counter, one with dish soap and one with a liquid soap mixed at 1:3 with water from rusticstrength.com. (It's our first time buying their product, but we've been happy with it.) I guess I trust bar soap better, but I have nothing to back that up.

I make my own bar-soap with just olive oil and caustic soda, no smelly stuff at all as I really don't like it. But we also keep a pump dispenser full of dish washing liquid by the washbasin, mostly for when Himself has been working on engines and comes indoors covered in engine oil, and another one in the kitchen, mostly for when I've been sorting meat scraps and have far too much grease and raw meat juice on my hands.

Not only is the liquid dish soap stronger for greasier hands, it means we can use it without getting greasy gunge all over everything else. Both of the pump dispensers are stainless steel and one is twenty years old and showing no sign of wearing out.

I am an ignoramus and can explain nothing. I comment only to note that I had an acquaintance whose family owned funeral homes, who had grown up working in them, and on that basis (somehow?) he advised me never to use bar soap, for sanitary reasons. I didn't heed his advice, because I still use Dove white bar soap in the shower, though for convenience purposes I use liquid soaps everywhere else.

I use bar soap in the shower, but also use that soap gel bodywash. The kind I use calls it a 5 in 1 since it is antibacterial, a shampoo, bodywash, etc. I go one further and use it for shaving cream too though. I use a pump of that bodywash, then mix it with a handful of water and it makes my razor glide over my skin. And it smells much better than shaving cream when I am done.

But... this is where I become odd because as a competitive swimmer I learned to hate body hair. In my swimming days we had "shaving parties" where  so that we would get faster cycle times without having body hair, so I learned to dislike having body hair on me. You would never really know it just looking at me in everyday clothes but I have been shaved from the neck down since I was a teenager. So using shower gel mixed with water saves me a lot of money in not having to buy cans of shaving cream. Kind of odd for a guy I know, but legs, chest, arms, etc... I've kept shaven for the past forty years. But my wife understands because she is a competitive swimmer as well. She actually had the State of Maine swim speed record for 11 years so we both take clean shaven to the extreme.

I turn little bits of bar soap into liquid soap.

Empty dish soap container, bits of bar soap, water equal liquid soap.

I use this mostly for laundry, though it could be for hand washing ot bathing ...

I use both in my house. I make my own soap from my goat's milk and beef tallow along with other oils and use it in the shower. Otherwise I use Dr. Bronner's peppermint castile soap for shampoo and when dealing with really greasy pots. I don't believe in contagion or germ theory so I don't think one form is superior to another.  My homemade soap has a 5% superfat so it is awesome for skin but not so much for dishes or clothes. My dishwashing liquid and laundry are Charlie's from Azure Standard.

>Who can help explain the differences an similarities of soap to this poor fool?

There is no difference between liquid and bar soap chemically - you can dry liquid soap to get a bar of the same material.  The difference is the water content.

That said, if you make your own soap, do not use it for a month.  It should be left to continue its saponification reaction.  If you have the ingredients balanced (caustic soda and fat or oil - it will be pH neutral.  I have made cold process soap using several different vegetable oils: corn oil, coconut oil, sunflower cooking oil - anything will do.

Hot process (like lye soap made in pioneer days) uses less total lye and the heat and stirring is the reason.  Essentially it causes the reaction to happen more completely in a shorter time.  The soap produced still has to be dried for a long time, like a month. During this time, the bar will become harder and harder.  After a certain wait, you can place the bar in a soap press of any shape to impress a name or picture on it. That pressing is not done on day 1.  It has to dry a bit first. An example of this is Palmolive soap which has a well rounded shape and the name impressed into it. This is done after a period of drying. At the same time the smooth shiny surface is produced.

Missionaries to Nigeria taught people to use wood ash directly in the soap making process.   They did not attempt to collect a concentrate as in pioneer days. This is still produced to this day and it is called (in West Africa) "Nigerian Soap".  It is sold in balls or bars and it is black!  The oil is heated and the wood ash dumped in directly.  Then it is cooked for a while. The amount of ash to add depends on the alkalinity produced by the input materials.  The result is ash-y, black and works well enough.  In Ghana they make a local soap sold in grapefruit sized balls called "Don't touch me".  It is make with deliberately high caustic soda content.  It will remove any stain including the cloth if you really want.  It cannot be used without gloves.  If you have some, you can melt it in a pan, add oil and it will turn into ordinary pH balanced soap.

Most soap is not actually pH balanced, though Pears (transparent orange bars) is carefully balanced for hyper-allergic skin. You can use a pH test strip from Amazon to test the result of your efforts - make soapy water and put in the strip. It is usually alkaline (pH >7.0).

Bar soap is awesome because it travels better than liquid soap. I didn't realize that until a pilot told me they use bar soap as shampoo and soap as it never spills in the suitcase. I make bar soap and use essential oils that smell very good, better than any other bar soap or liquid I've ever tried. If you make your own bar soap, you can experiment with different scents until you too, find your perfect scent. The fats you choose can change how moisturizing the soap is. The essential oils I use smell like a boreal forest. Many store bought liquid soaps contain harmful chemicals. My soap is made of fat, lye, and essential oils. Nothing in it is harmful.

So we use bar soap in the bathroom at the sink, because we like buying it from local soapmakers.  We use liquid soap in the kitchen.  In the tub we use liquid.  I have a goal of switching to a refillable bottle for the kitchen sink that I want to start taking to the zero waste store in my area for refill, spring goal for me, I'm almost out of the Eco I've been using.

Ned Harr wrote:I had an acquaintance whose family owned funeral homes, who had grown up working in them, and on that basis (somehow?) he advised me never to use bar soap, for sanitary reasons.

Hmmmm. This has brought back some rather painful flashbacks to being with my first husband many, many moons ago who developed Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and was totally obsessed with hand-washing so he wouldn't contaminate me.  This was at a time when liquid soaps and dispensers weren't really a thing in domestic situations, but he would get through an entire bar of soap every day (and half a bottle of shampoo...) because by the time he'd washed his hands, then washed the tap he'd originally turned on with his contaminated hands, then washed the bar of soap which he's originally handled with his contaminated hands, then gone through the whole procedure often enough that he was satisfied that no trace of contamination was present on himself or the bar of soap or the handle of the tap or the washbasin, there wasn't much soap left.

These days I have liquid soap available in a pump action dispenser that I can operate with an elbow if necessary, and the main tap in the kitchen is a lever tap which can also be operated with an elbow.

And I sometimes wonder if things would have been different if these things had been readily available to me 40 years ago...

Crispin Pemberton-Pigott wrote:>Who can help explain the differences an similarities of soap to this poor fool?

There is no difference between liquid and bar soap chemically - you can dry liquid soap to get a bar of the same material.  The difference is the water content.

That said, if you make your own soap, do not use it for a month.  It should be left to continue its saponification reaction.  If you have the ingredients balanced (caustic soda and fat or oil - it will be pH neutral.  I have made cold process soap using several different vegetable oils: corn oil, coconut oil, sunflower cooking oil - anything will do.

Hot process (like lye soap made in pioneer days) uses less total lye and the heat and stirring is the reason.  Essentially it causes the reaction to happen more completely in a shorter time.  The soap produced still has to be dried for a long time, like a month. During this time, the bar will become harder and harder.  After a certain wait, you can place the bar in a soap press of any shape to impress a name or picture on it. That pressing is not done on day 1.  It has to dry a bit first. An example of this is Palmolive soap which has a well rounded shape and the name impressed into it. This is done after a period of drying. At the same time the smooth shiny surface is produced.

Missionaries to Nigeria taught people to use wood ash directly in the soap making process.   They did not attempt to collect a concentrate as in pioneer days. This is still produced to this day and it is called (in West Africa) "Nigerian Soap".  It is sold in balls or bars and it is black!  The oil is heated and the wood ash dumped in directly.  Then it is cooked for a while. The amount of ash to add depends on the alkalinity produced by the input materials.  The result is ash-y, black and works well enough.  In Ghana they make a local soap sold in grapefruit sized balls called "Don't touch me".  It is make with deliberately high caustic soda content.  It will remove any stain including the cloth if you really want.  It cannot be used without gloves.  If you have some, you can melt it in a pan, add oil and it will turn into ordinary pH balanced soap.

Most soap is not actually pH balanced, though Pears (transparent orange bars) is carefully balanced for hyper-allergic skin. You can use a pH test strip from Amazon to test the result of your efforts - make soapy water and put in the strip. It is usually alkaline (pH >7.0).

Thank you for this neato information!

I really do prefer bar soap - (nothing artificial though).
I would love to learn how to make it.
I’m a bit intimidated though, not only because of the caustic liquids, but also because I would be using sheep tallow and we have hard water. We have ashes from the Rocket Heater.
Im still searching for a recipe that works with all of these ingredients to produce a bar of soap that doesn’t feel greasy in the end and lasts as long as some others I’ve used - a long time!