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Comment by analog31 | Hacker News Reader

Soap is artificially cheap too, because it's a byproduct of meat production. If I wanted to think ecologically about soap, I'd think about its source.

I use hotel soap, but would have utterly no problem bringing a tiny amount of body wash with me. I already use liquid body wash at home because I live in a region with hard water, and soap turns into soap scum.

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Never thought of liquid soap as being less cleaning due to soap scum. Interesting. I used Dr Bronners Peppermint for scalp-to-toes cleansing for nearly a decade, but switched to bar soap around the start of the pandemic when I moved to somewhere where it wasn't easy to get (either in store, or stuff shipped to the house, pretty remote, snowy location without delivery access during the winter months).

I now live in a much more urban area, but am trying to reduce unnecessary plastic consumption - not to the extent of being "trash-free", but instead in the sense of trying to support alternatives, so that it becomes more standard/easy to access. There are stores with bulk dispensers of a variety of cleaning products near me. I may consider switching back for my home shower usage.

You used to be able to get bar "soap" that was based on detergent, not soap. Detergent is identified by things like sodium lauryl sulfate etc. Remember "you're not really clean until you're Zest-fully clean." because Zest was made from detergent.

Soap is listed in the ingredients as being based on tallow or lard. When my family moved to a hard-water region, I looked at ingredient labels, and discovered that you can't buy detergent based "soap" any more -- even Zest is based on soap. This could be due to a glut of those materials triggered by rising meat production.

So we switched to liquid hand and body wash, which is detergent based. It's not as luxurious as soap, but I'm the one who cleans the bathrooms, so I make the rules.

Soap scum is calcium stearate, which is not soluble in water, and remarkably difficult to remove from the inside of bathtubs and showers. And your water softener has to work remarkably well to completely eliminate soap scum.

Some people have problems with sodium lauryl sulfate. In toothpaste it gives me mouth ulcers, and in soap I get skin irritation. It’s quite hard to find SLS free toothpaste, or even shampoo, but it could be worth trying if you have unexplained skin irritation. I haven’t had one ulcer since swapping toothpaste and before that I was getting them all the time.

>Soap is artificially cheap too, because it's a byproduct of meat production

source? I know it might traditionally be made from animal fats, but the cheap soaps seem to use SLS, which wikipedia describes as "derived from palm kernel oil or coconut oil"

SLS is a detergent not a soap.

Look at the ingredients in a soap like ivory or zest (which used to be a detergent until 2008), or Irish spring (which I like, but is definitely a cheap soap) - the first one will be sodium palmitate or tallowate.

> SLS is a detergent not a soap.

That's technically correct but colloquially those are interchangeable, eg. dish "soap", or liquid hand "soap".

>Look at the ingredients in a soap like ivory or zest (which used to be a detergent until 2008), or Irish spring (which I like, but is definitely a cheap soap) - the first one will be sodium palmitate or tallowate.

After checking the ingredient lists of body washes/hand soaps on amazon, this seems to be limited to solid soaps. I suppose it still means the parent post's point is true (ie. solid soaps are artificially cheaper because of animal fat), but in the context of this story it doesn't matter much. Liquid soaps are more popular than solid soaps[1], except in low income countries where they're more popular because they're cheaper[2]. In my experience liquid soaps are at least as popular as solid soaps in hotels, so it's safe to assume they're willing to fork over money for non-subsidized soap (ie. liquid soaps) and the animal subsidy isn't something that's driving hotel soap waste.

[1] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/40-billion-worldwid...

[2] https://www.reportlinker.com/p05916773/UAE-Soap-Market-By-Fo...

I belong to a family of chemists, and there's a general sense of resignation over the fact that terms have such disparate popular and technical definitions. Not to mention, legal ones as well.

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