Here it is! It's light, it's fluffy, it's all natural, it's handmade and it's moisturising. It's like putting your hand in chocolate mousse with all the bubbles! You'll never look at soap the same way again! Before soap there was clay, water and sand and pumice and ashes, legend says soap was discovered in a pretty gross way, that some Roman women were washing their closed in River Tiber which was below an animal sacrifice zone... they say the fats ran down into the river and caused a soapy clay. However, the ancient Babylonians were making soap as early as 2800BC, which were made with fats boiled with ashes. In AD77 men were using soap made from tallow and ashes to give their hair a ‘reddish tint’. Meanwhile, The Romans and the Greeks created public baths and had running water for people to bath and used soap as well as oils, they would scrape themselves clean once out of the bath. But the vegetable oil based soaps appeared in the Middle Ages and were very luxurious, Syria produced these and they were shipped to Europe, these were olive oil based and infused with laurel oil. Not long after, the French, Italian, Spanish and finally the English followed, of this time, the Castile soap was the best known, it’s named after the area it’s produced and was a white olive oil based bar soap, it was highly popular with the European Royals who just loved it. The American colonies in the 1500-1700s were opposed to bathing as they decided that water would actually spread disease, so the soap was mostly used for cleaning. Happily in the 1800s Americans had started bathing but still weren’t fans of the soap, they considered soap for laundry and cleaning. It was the civil war that changed things around and soap for personal hygiene became ‘a thing’. The 1800s saw soap heavily taxed as a luxury item, but when the tax was lifted soap was more available and became more popular, 1879 saw one of the first perfumed toilet soaps and in 1898 Palmolive soap was invented which became the world best selling soap in the early 1900s. By 1908 the solid vegetable based fats revolutionised the soaps as it was a movement away from using the traditional animal fats. World War ! And World War II had created a shortage of animal fats and therefore an increase in the use of synthetic detergents. My soap contains castille soap, glycerine, water, coconut oil, copra, jojoba oil and fragrance.
