Sure. Just like it was all a bunch of hocus-pocus.
The truth is, most bars on store shelves today aren't actually soap. I know I've talked about that before, but do you know why those non-soap bars ended up on the shelves in the first place?
Money, of course.
So let's back up and look at what soap really is at its core: water, fats or oils, and lye. While lye is now manufactured in chemical plants, it was once something people learned to make themselves. Before that, it occurred naturally and was discovered almost by accident.
The first soap likely was an accident. Ancient Mesopotamians, around the time written language first appeared, left some of the earliest records describing soap and its use for cleaning. Before soap, people cleaned themselves with oils, steam, and scraping tools to remove dirt and debris from their skin.
Somewhere along the way, there was probably a campfire that had been used over and over again. Ashes built up. Rainwater soaked through them. Animal fat dripped into the fire from cooking meat. One day, someone digging through the remains may have found something unexpected. The ashes had produced lye, and when the lye mixed with water and fat, it created crude soap.
Was it exactly like that? Nobody knows for sure. But that's the leading theory.
What we do know is that the result worked far better than scraping yourself with a stick.
Today, thankfully, we don't make our own lye from campfire ashes. It's a highly caustic substance, and buying it from a chemical supplier is a whole lot safer than experimenting in the backyard barbecue pit.
For thousands of years, this simple combination of fat, water, and lye was the gold standard of getting clean. If this were a movie, you'd see a calendar flipping from ancient civilizations all the way to the 1920s. That's a long reign.
Then World War I changed things.
Wartime shortages made oils and fats more expensive, so scientists began searching for alternative cleaning agents. Not for bathing, but for laundry and dishwashing. Traditional soap could leave behind soap scum, especially in hard water, and people wanted something that worked better on clothes and dishes.
This search led to the creation of synthetic detergents and chemical surfactants.
At first, these products were incredibly harsh. But they were also dramatically cheaper than real soap, and manufacturers loved that. Consumers loved the lower prices too.
Before long, those same surfactants made their way from the laundry room into the bathroom.
Back then, labeling laws were minimal, and companies weren't exactly eager to explain what was in their products. Over time, regulations changed. Today, if a cleansing bar isn't made through the traditional soap-making process, it generally can't be labeled simply as "soap." That's why you'll see terms like "beauty bar," "cleansing bar," or "deodorant bar" instead.
The whole thing started because manufacturers were looking for a cheaper way to wash clothes and dishes during wartime. Then we decided those same bargain ingredients were good enough for our skin.
But now we know better.
Today, we can turn a package over and read the ingredient list. We can see that some of the same surfactants used in dish soap are also used in many bath bars.
I guess that's great for ducks after an oil spill.
Me? I'll take real soap.
The soap that cleaned generations of people before us. The soap that served humanity for most of recorded history.
That's good enough for me.