Let's Talk About Soap!
Go into your bathroom, right now. Open up your cabinet, or look in your shower. What's the label on the soap bar say? Dove, Ivory, or Palmolive? Maybe, Dial? Dr. Squatch?
Walk down the aisles of a grocery store, or pharmacy, and an endless amounts of soap bombard you from every side, with smells galore, and claims even more!
It wasn't always like this though.
Soap used to be made in the home. It was an indelible skill passed down through the matriarchal line. It took time, labor, and knowledge.
And then... something changed.
Soap became a commodity. Branded. Global.
It started to mean a whole lot more than cleanliness. It became associated with luxury, status, and even morality....
Somehow, the bar itself outlasted all of it.
Today, soap is having a renaissance. It's no longer just a product. It's a craft. Artisan makers are reshaping what soap is, and who it's for.
Now, let's go back in time, and discuss how those bars of soap became household names, and where soap is headed today.
Pears' Changes The Game
To understand the world Pears Soap enters into, and why it was so revolutionary, we must first discuss Victorian Era cosmetics.
During this time period in England, skincare was—to put it lightly—often toxic. Ammonia was applied directly to the face. Beauty creams contained lead, while other products—including some soaps—incorporated arsenic and mercury to achieve a more “pale” complexion.
The consequences were severe: nervous system damage, kidney disease, and a range of illnesses now recognized as heavy metal poisoning.
These beauty products were also not an everyday commodity. They were expensive and hard to come by for the commoner.
In 1807, Andrew Pears created a translucent soap that was unlike the dangerous products on the market. It was gentle on the skin. It was made with glycerin and other natural ingredients, none of them being arsenic.
It was one of the first soaps to be heavily marketed. Thanks to Thomas Barratt, who created campaigns to market the soap to the masses. Thomas Barratt’s campaigns were so effective that Pears became synonymous with soap in its time. Ad campaigns included slogans like "Good Morning. Have you used Pears' soap?", and famous oil paintings bought by the tycoon and repurposed into advertising. Lillie Langtry, a socialite, stage actress and celebrity of the time, actually endorsed the soap. This would be one of the first major celebrity endorsements of a product.
But to understand the renaissance, we have to understand the revolution that made soap a household word in the first place.
Ivory Soap and a Turn towards Purity.
In 1879, Harley Procter and James N. Gamble created a bar of soap that was unlike any other bar that had been seen (You'll see that again). Other bars, aside from Pears', the Castile bars and others of the time, had quite a bit of impurities. When Procter and Gamble sent their soap to experts, the results were spectacular. 99.44% pure.
And by God, the damn thing floated.
"The Soap That Floats."
One telling goes: A worker in the factory let the soap mixer run for too long, adding a bit too much air into the bar.
Another telling: Rivers, streams, and lakes are notoriously murky, and floating soap was essential to see when bathing.
Whether the air added to this soap was purposeful or accidental, sources differ on, but the company disputes the accidental claim. We will let you decide.
As for the name of the bar. We can credit the Bible. A verse from Psalms 45 "All thy garments smell of myrrh, and aloes, and cassia, out of the ivory palaces, whereby they have made thee glad."
Ivory Soap was born.
5 cents for 10 oz of soap was the going rate in 1879 (roughly $1.30–$1.60 today). Compare that to Pears’, which entered the market in 1807 at nearly $3.40, in today's dollars. That's roughly half the price.
Soap was no longer a marker of class. The fishmonger and the lawyer could both afford the same bar.
It wasn't enough for the soap to just clean anymore. It had to be standardized.
This wasn't the soap of yesteryear. This wasn't backyard soap anymore. No wood ash and fats cooked in a pot here.
This soap was consistent.
Every batch.
99.44% pure.
That's a hard number for grandma to compete with.
Palmolive and a Return to the Origin.
It was soap that the Pharaohs would have used, so the commercials went. Made with olive oil, palm oil, and cocoa butter. Light green. This soap would go on to become the best selling soap in the world, at the start of the 20th century.
Palmolive.
Introduced in 1898 by B.J. Johnson Soap Company in Milwaukee—later absorbed into what became Colgate-Palmolive—the brand positioned itself not as innovation, but as return.
Back to Egypt.
Back to where soap was said to have originated (Mesopotamia and Babylon are harder to evoke in adverts).
Early advertisements included Cleopatra, images of exotic locales, and claims of luxuries of old being brought into modern day.
There is something appealing about using a soap that might have been used by ancient people. It wasn't just modern soap makers making soap. There was heritage in those bars of soap. It was a lineage thousands of years old.
Bathe like an Egyptian.
Bathe like a Grecian.
It was historical call-backs, and nostalgia bombs. Olive oil, Palm oil, Lanolin (an emollient made from lamb's wool), Glycerin, Cocoa Butter. It was marketed as a "beauty bar" compared to harsher soaps of the day. And it didn’t cost a fortune either. A 1923 advertisement lists Palmolive at 10 cents a bar—likely 3.5 to 4 oz (about $1.93 today).
If Pears' was a solution to a problem, and Ivory was the standard of purity, Palmolive was a cohesive story. It gave soap historical significance beyond backyard kettle soap. It wasn't just luxurious in modern day. It was timeless luxury.
Soap was now anchored in history.
Dove and an Unmistakable Feeling.
"Soap dries your skin, while Dove creams your skin while you wash" the advertisement repeats almost on a loop.
1/4 moisturizing cream added to every bar, and a curved shape to fit your hand.
A beauty bar the likes of which had not been seen before.
In 1957, Unilever, a multi-national conglomerate, which helped spread commercialized soap through out the world post WWII, launched Dove.
Dove was not soap. And they were okay with that. More than okay. That was their selling point.
They were a hybrid synthetic detergent. These bars still contained the classic fat+lye saponified mix, but the "cleansing cream"? Engineered. Designed. Meticulously added. Nothing left to chance.
The price tag reflected it. Dove enters the market at $1.00 a bar. That's almost 12 dollars. You were paying to be pampered.
Advertisements for Dove positioned soap as "old fashioned", "drying", while Dove was soft on the skin.
Soap used to be utilitarian. It would cleanse. What Palmolive hinted at with its "beauty bars", Dove went full tilt.
Soap would now provide a feeling. An unmistakable feeling.
It wasn't enough to just clean. Now cleanliness had to feel good.
It's why in 2004, Dove launched a campaign redefining beauty standards. They would have photoshoots and commercials featuring average, everyday women, rather than models. Being beautiful didn't have to mean hours of makeup and tons of editing. "Real" consumers were just as deserving of looking and feeling special as the models in the ads of old.
Dove is now one of the top selling soaps of all time. Which is ironic. Because it's not technically soap.
The Return of the Artisan Brand.
Synthetic detergents, body washes, liquid soaps. These become the standard as the turn of the century approached. Bars of soap were becoming somewhat stale. Your grandma's soap.
But, this is where companies like Lush, Dr. Bronner's, and The Body Shop begin to push back, and paved the way for the swirled loaves of artisan goat milk soaps topped with calendula and lavender flowers you see on Instagram today.
These companies reintroduced ‘natural soap’ to the mainstream—but framed it as a return, not an innovation. Stores like The Body Shop made natural soaps "in style" again. To them, synthetic detergents were almost too clean. They were industrial. Ads for natural soap companies would poke fun at the long chemical names for surfactants and claim, if you can't pronounce it, you shouldn't put it on your skin. Lush allowed you to try before you buy which harkened back to the communal aspect of buying soap at the market. Dr. Bronner's pushed a mentality of "social and natural", even adding hemp oil, as a way to support legalization of industrial hemp production.
Then Dr. Squatch came on the scene in 2013. For decades, most soap advertising—aside from early Ivory campaigns—targeted women. Even when men appeared, they were framed at a distance: ‘Men don’t want fragrances. They just want soap.’ These brands weren’t speaking to men—they were speaking about them.
Dr. Squatch's founder, Jack Haldrup tapped into a market after finding out traditional soaps didn't cause his psoriasis to flare up. He realized there were many men out there that were also tired of "Icy Blue Scented 8-1 Body Wash". They were tired of having limited options in the way of body products, and actually didn't mind smelling like the forest, or buying soap that someone could find at Lush.
Dr. Squatch, Lush, Dr. Bronner's, the Body Shop are all multi-million dollar brands. Even all the Instagram posts and TikToks of soap being poured into a mold is in part an aesthetic. Much like with Ivory, Palmolive, Dove, and even Pears', some of what is being sold, is the ideology of the soap, not just the soap itself.
Final Thoughts
Soap is big business. The top five multi-national "soap brands", and let's keep in mind, these "soap brands" aren't just selling soap anymore, generate roughly $200 billion in revenue combined. That's a long ways from "Good Morning. Have you used Pears' soap?"
With that being said, soap is starting to swing back towards traditional styles. Consumers, especially Gen-Z and Millenials, and even Gen-X, care about the ingredients. Not just the feeling. Consumers are dedicated to the story behind a product. The authenticity of it.
Corporate, and standardized soaps are multi-billion dollar industry for a reason. They work. They cleanse. They soften. They know their market.
With the artisan revolution, we are being sold the idea that maybe the kettle cooked soaps of yesteryear and the Aleppo soaps of way back had something going for them.
They just needed some refinement and a really good story.