The dope on soap: it might give your skin hope

By Steven Powell, spowell2@mailbox.sc.edu, 803-777-1923

When’s the last time you washed with soap? This morning?

Maybe not. As it turns out, a lot of people probably haven’t had soap in their bathroom in years – even though they might get a good lather going in the shower every morning.

According to University of South Carolina alumnus Scott Price, what many people use is not actually soap.

“Go to a supermarket and pick up a box of brand X soap – or what you think is soap. If you look carefully at the box, though, you might find it says ‘beauty bar’ or ‘bath bar’ on it,” said Price. “That’s not soap, that’s detergent. By law, they can’t call it soap.”

“To be truly soap, the soap has to result from the process of saponification on a fat or oil,” Price said.

Animal and vegetable fats or oils are just one step away from being soap. Whether it’s olive oil, beef fat or peanut oil, if you mix it with the right amount of lye, it saponifies, meaning it “turns into soap.” Lye, or hydroxide, isn’t as commonplace as it used to be, but it has long been purchased in general stores by farmers for a variety of uses, including soap-making.

Take, for example, the glop of grease you drain off a skillet of browned hamburger. That’s beef tallow, and it’s readily converted into soap with lye. Tallow is made up of large molecules that have chemical linkages called esters in them. Lye cuts those links to generate two distinct kinds of molecules: a carboxylate salt and glycerin.

The carboxylate salt is, literally, soap. It has “soapy” characteristics – it likes to co-mingle with grease but also with water. That’s why soap and water get you clean: soap will pull oils and fats off your hands and send them into the water, so both the soap and any oily residues you have on your skin go down the drain.

Washing with just soap also leaves your skin rather bare, though, and that’s where Price would like to help you out. The other product of saponification, glycerin, is a natural moisturizer that he thinks should stay with the carboxylate salt in a bar of soap.

“When large companies make a soap, a lot of the time what they’ll do is separate the soap from the glycerin. They drain the glycerin off. Then they sell it back to you in their moisturizers,” Price said. “Our soap is different.”

Along with his USC alumna wife, Robin, and their children Anna and Jay, Price has started a soap-making company, Sandlapper Soaps, that they operate out of their home in Columbia, S.C. “Ours contains that glycerin, which is a humectant – it draws moisture to your skin, from the atmosphere and from your body.”

Beyond just ensuring that the natural glycerin is left in your cleansing routine, the Price family is part of a larger community – some hobbyist, some small-scale commercial – that’s bringing fine craftsmanship into the realm of soap-making.

“With most of our soaps we use a blend of oil. Each oil has its own characteristics. Olive oil is very nourishing, coconut oil will make the bar harder and has its own lathering properties,” Price said. “Soap-makers will blend lots of different oils when they make their soaps – everybody’s got their own proprietary blend mixtures that are highly guarded.”

In addition to adjusting the original blend of oils, Sandlapper Soaps also puts in more than a little extra after saponification. They offer several dozen soaps with a variety of additives, including mango, papaya, bay rum, peach, tangerine, rosemary, peppermint, cucumber, lilac, oatmeal, honeysuckle, aloe, eucalyptus, and ginger (in their “Mary Ann” soap), just to name a few.

The Price family recipe – real soap, its byproduct glycerin, and additives like that – beats the artificial detergents that a lot of people slather on their skin on a daily basis.  

“If you drink lots of water, and you bathe with a real soap with its natural glycerin, your skin is just going to be better – more flexible, viable, healthier – than it would be by using one of those detergent bars, and then putting one of those moisturizers on top,” Price said.

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