Written by Ailsa Fraser
For most of the last few millennia, soap wasn’t nearly as common in everyday life as it is today. But staying clean has always been a necessity, for both humans and animals. Ancient Greeks and Romans weren’t familiar with soap or its use until the mid-first century BCE, but they stayed clean via baths and tools used to scrape at the skin, as well as using olive oil. Even once it was discovered, soap didn’t necessarily catch on. One legend around how soap was invented comes from Mount Sapo, near Rome, around 3000 years ago. Animals would be burnt there as offerings to the gods, and when the ashes from the fire mixed with fats from the animals, the substance ran down the mountainside and was absorbed into the soil. Women who washed clothes nearby found that the slippery clay soil was especially effective at getting out dirt.
Jumping forward a thousand years, there was a soapmaking community based in Cheapside, London from approximately 1200CE. Even then, though, use of soap was seen as more luxurious than it is today. Taxes on it were high and grew even higher by the time of the Napoleonic Wars, making the products expensive. The process for producing it exacerbated the cost: it was inherently small-scale, mixing plant ashes (containing carbonate) into water and adding animal fats, then boiling slowly until the water evaporated. Over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, innovations came about that enhanced the efficiency of soapmaking, and it had other uses as well, such as for treating skin conditions. However, soap didn’t enjoy the widespread use it has today until the Crimean War—and, in the United States, until the American Civil War.
Florence Nightingale’s work during the Crimean War is famous, but her emphasis on hygiene while treating patients was also crucial in assuring the sudden popularity of soap. The impact was felt across the UK as well as in America, where during the American Civil War, observers and doctors urged people to take the same cleanliness precautions in order to prevent unnecessary loss of life. Even upper-class Americans had little interest in hygiene, so this was a large shift. This sudden cultural interest in soap boosted demand, which innovations in the soapmaking process helped to meet, and when demand was met, advertising was used to boost it even more. The soap industry in the early twentieth century was one of the first to utilise widespread marketing to persuade people to buy their products, meaning that a previously artisanal product bought only occasionally became a must-have for every household.
All animals have a vested interest in staying clean, and humans have used a range of ways to achieve this other than soap, but it is difficult to imagine a world in which soap isn’t ubiquitous with washing or hygiene. The economic and cultural interests that shaped soap’s place as a cornerstone of modern society are more recent than often appreciated, but the one thing certain is that as our scientific knowledge of its production evolves, so will soap, its production, and its uses. Considering the current increasing popularity of traditional, handmade soaps in opposition to industrial ones, it will be interesting to see how next these norms will change in the face of changing scientific knowledge, cultural associations, and economic interests.
Bibliography
Kostka, Kimberly L., and David D. McKay. “Chemists Clean up: A History and Exploration of the Craft of Soapmaking – How Soap Came to Be Common in America.” Journal of Chemical Education 79, no. 10 (2002): 1172–1175.
Routh, Hirak Behari, Kazal Rekha Bhowmik, Lawrence Charles Parish, and Joseph A. Witkowski. “Soaps: From the Phoenicians to the 20th century—A Historical Review.” Clinics in Dermatology 14, no. 1 (1996): 3–6.
Featured image credit: “Soap Opera in Provence, France” by pictalogue is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.
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