Old Soap
March 18, 2020 3:50 PM   Subscribe

'In many ways, the soap I seek could be described as mundane. I seek the brands which were once very commonplace, but which are now really very difficult to find.'
Matthew Brooks's instagram account is a collection of old bars of packaged soap.
posted by Fiasco da Gama (43 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite
 
My brain needs washing.
posted by lextex at 3:52 PM on March 18, 2020 [1 favorite]


My brain needs washing.

With carbolic soap.
posted by StickyCarpet at 3:54 PM on March 18, 2020 [1 favorite]


'In many ways, the soap I seek could be described as mundane.'

I would read the Norwegian novel that begins with this sentence.
posted by Beardman at 4:04 PM on March 18, 2020 [30 favorites]


Well, he’s doing better than this lady.
posted by rewil at 4:20 PM on March 18, 2020 [5 favorites]


Pears transparent is a FANTASTIC soap. Wish I could still find it, too.
posted by Silvery Fish at 4:37 PM on March 18, 2020 [4 favorites]


Apparently Dollar Tree carries it, though you can't order it online currently.
posted by tavella at 4:49 PM on March 18, 2020 [1 favorite]


That Pears transparent is all over the place here in Mexico, it is the best!
posted by Stonestock Relentless at 4:54 PM on March 18, 2020 [1 favorite]


Barth's vitamin E soap was one of the best of all time before the horrible 'natural products' cancer that was Tom's of Maine metastasized to them and stopped making it.

Lobob's contact lens bar soap was by far the least irritating bar soap I ever used.
posted by jamjam at 5:05 PM on March 18, 2020


This is great.

Recently I wanted Cashmere Bouquet and I couldn't get it. It was the only soap I could use for a while when I was little, and I thought it might help again, but it is no more.

A Christmas gift of little French soaps is proving to be a real lifesaver in this time of trial. I can feel it moisturizing my hands when I'm done.
posted by Countess Elena at 5:07 PM on March 18, 2020


From back when "coal tar" connoted "health and hygiene", apparently..
posted by Nerd of the North at 5:07 PM on March 18, 2020 [1 favorite]


forbidden scrubs
posted by brook horse at 5:09 PM on March 18, 2020 [3 favorites]


Nerd of the North, coal tar and pine tar soap are still used for psoriasis.

My mother still has one small chunk left of Great-Grandma's lye-and-rendered-fat soap. It takes out laundry stains like nothing else I've seen.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 5:12 PM on March 18, 2020 [4 favorites]


Dr. Bronner's soap pleases me.
posted by mdoar at 5:15 PM on March 18, 2020 [4 favorites]


I just recently noticed how few bar soap brands are left in the regular grocery stores. I can recall many more. Now they've been crowded away by liquid soaps and body washes (which require plastic containers). A pity.

Grew up with this stuff, still available here and there.
posted by Miko at 5:22 PM on March 18, 2020 [1 favorite]


I'm guessing the Pears transparent is all over the place at the discount and surplus stores; here in the Northeast, that's OSJL. As for old timey looking soap, it's still places if you look outside mainstream Western US retail. My Fan and Mysore soaps look unchanged for at least 50 years.

(Here's a very short old-internet review of soaps from a guy I sort-of-dated. Instagram? Bah! You had to hard-code all those webpages. )
posted by cobaltnine at 5:27 PM on March 18, 2020 [1 favorite]


The Instagram caption for Pear's Transparent Soap says that the original formulation was discontinued in 2009 in favor of a much cheaper process.

Dr. Bronner's is the best. Come for the kooky packaging, stay for the wonderful soap.
posted by dweingart at 5:41 PM on March 18, 2020 [2 favorites]


I seek the brands which were once very commonplace, but which are now really very difficult to find.

So that’s all brands of soap, judging by my local supermarket — the soap shelves were stripped bare two weeks ago and have stayed bare ever since.
posted by snowmentality at 5:41 PM on March 18, 2020 [1 favorite]


Wolverines!
posted by clavdivs at 6:05 PM on March 18, 2020


Matthew Brooks's instagram account is a collection of old bars of packaged soap.

does what it says on the tin wrapper
posted by entropicamericana at 6:08 PM on March 18, 2020 [1 favorite]


Yeah, Pears is a shadow of its former self. It turns to goo almost immediately now. And the smell of carbolic soap hacked into lumps at school, along with the smell of Jeyes' Fluid: kills everything, do those two.

Nice to see the Gerard/INO and CWS (Co-op) soap looking so like Aleppo soap. I'm still loving the made-in-Canada-by-Syrian-soapmakers stuff I got last year. No wrapper, though.
posted by scruss at 6:23 PM on March 18, 2020


I miss the old Pear's so much, haven't found anything quite like it.

Fels-Naphtha soap still exists in some format, that's surprising. Looks like they took the naphtha out (for good reason). The ruins of the old factory were a landmark on my childhood trips to the shore.
posted by sepviva at 6:31 PM on March 18, 2020 [3 favorites]


My grandparents used to use Lux and I remember thinking the packaging was so retro-hip.
posted by potrzebie at 6:36 PM on March 18, 2020 [1 favorite]


I don’t know if I’ve ever smelled carbolic soap, but it’s such a literary touchstone that I’m extra curious now.

I want a piece of Bath brick, too. Someday I’ll be fast enough on EBay.
posted by clew at 7:13 PM on March 18, 2020


clew: hit a bulk food/health food store. All the ones I've seen in Canada and the USA usually have a "natural soap" section. There are all sorts of soap there. Carbolic's the pinkish/orange one that smells intensely chemical
posted by scruss at 7:21 PM on March 18, 2020 [1 favorite]


From back when "coal tar" connoted "health and hygiene", apparently..

Coal tar shampoo is the most effective over the counter shampoo if you're having scalp problems. T/Gel is the main known brand but there are a lot of others out there. It's very effective against fungus and parasites and calms itch.
posted by hippybear at 7:33 PM on March 18, 2020 [4 favorites]


I remember Lifebuoy soap, very vaguely. I think I only saw it in horse stables.
posted by bz at 7:48 PM on March 18, 2020


I use a triad of favorite odd soaps that (cross fingers) are still buyable. (1) that hardy Fels-Naptha bar. I love it when washing hands for the unreconstructed old timey germ-kill bite of the thing; (2) a lovely green Korean cucumber soap I call "oio" because thatʻs what the hangul script looks like; and (3) a soap of particular strong fragrance whose name Iʻm not divulging because I found it by its odor a month ago in a little ethnogrocery. Iʻd been searching for that particular scent for decades. Now that Iʻve found it Iʻm resolving to hoard it like toilet paper in a pandemic. (I bought the only 2 bars that they had in stock.)

Sort of OT maybe -- throughout the year when I was a 10-year old, my mom would send me out to the local grocery store to pick up essential stuff, occasionally among which would be laundry detergent. I bought a different brand each time: I loved the pop-arty colors and the weird names-- Super Suds, Vel, Fab, Oxydol, Dreft -- and she never complained, even though she was a Tide lady. Two decades and the other side of the nation later, I cajoled my punk rock band to do a rogue photo shoot in the Safeway, wearing the gaudiest aloha shirts I could find, and holding their chromatic laundry detergent box counterparts. They never complained either.
posted by Droll Lord at 7:52 PM on March 18, 2020 [3 favorites]


I realised at this time that smell was something which made the past in a way "tangible"; whenever I let grandparents smell the carbolic soap, they would immediately say it reminded them of bomb shelters during WW2 or their grandmother's wash day.
This would make a fantastic tool for people who do historical interviews. How to get a subject who's lived a long and varied life to suddenly remember every detail about a setting in the distant past? Go straight for the sense of smell.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 7:52 PM on March 18, 2020 [6 favorites]


Grew up with this stuff, still available here and there.


Kirk's Castile is my go-to. I also like Dr. Bronner's baby soap, but it's more spensive.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 9:04 PM on March 18, 2020 [1 favorite]


Droll Lord, is it Mysore sandalwood soap?
posted by tavella at 9:41 PM on March 18, 2020 [1 favorite]


I am old enough to remember the distinctive phenol smell of proper carbolic soap (Lifebuoy) - there was a bar in the outside toilet so my dad could wash his hands at the cold tap when he came in from the garden, Lifebuoy is still made, but doesn't contain phenol any more - Ihave a bar from Kenya that is the right colour, but only smells faintly of phenol.

Old-fashioned pharmacists, like my local shop are pretty reliable sources of bar soap - one of my friends buys a dozen bars of Yardley's lavender soap there every time she visits.
posted by Fuchsoid at 10:13 PM on March 18, 2020


there was a bar in the outside toilet so my dad could wash his hands at the cold tap when he came in from the garden

We had a half-bath off the mudroom, where there was always a bar of Lava soap for Dad to wash his hands after working on whatever it was he did in his workshop. (Seemed to involve a lot of engine grease.)
posted by The Underpants Monster at 10:22 PM on March 18, 2020 [3 favorites]


I've read so many references to the unmistakable smell of carbolic in books, and I was always intensely curious as to what it was like. A little while ago, I started using a an interesting, old-school skincare product (Biologique Recherche Lotion P50 1970, if you're curious) that famously smells truly, remarkably, distinctively terrible.

Turns out, a big part of its notorious smell is the phenol in it. And if I understand correctly, phenol is another name for carbolic acid. It's in Chloroseptic throat spray, to give you an idea. It's a great skincare product, but every time I use it, I call my self Stinky Corpse Stink for an hour. Nothing is really like it. So yeah, I guess I see how it would lodge in one's memory, but mercy, not in a nice way.
posted by mostlymartha at 10:37 PM on March 18, 2020 [1 favorite]


Remember the clips, a few years ago, from the Old Nablus soap factory?
posted by growabrain at 1:27 AM on March 19, 2020 [2 favorites]


I remember the Lifebuoy brand, but can't remember if I ever used it. Lava is the shizzle for getting bike chain grease off of hands, though.
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:49 AM on March 19, 2020


Now that you can get bar shampoo and bar conditioner to avoid waste, I wonder if we will see a resurgence of bar soaps. The packages will all be light pastel colors with a single watercolor style brushstroke and be branded like

simple.
just soap.
posted by Emmy Rae at 8:01 AM on March 19, 2020 [3 favorites]


Matthew Brooks's instagram account is a collection of old bars of packaged soap.

does what it says on the tin wrapper
sometimes tin

(My parents have had a tin like this--sans soap--in their 1920s-style bathroom in Illinois for 30 years. And I just learned when I was looking for its picture that it was from Mystic, which is fairly close to where I live now. I hope that Mr. Brooks may someday find an occupied tin.)
posted by dlugoczaj at 8:26 AM on March 19, 2020


(link above seems not to work--try this)
posted by dlugoczaj at 8:44 AM on March 19, 2020


Lava also lived in the half bath near my father's basement workshop. It was kind of unpleasant to use if you didn't have grease on your hands, though.
posted by tavella at 9:22 AM on March 19, 2020 [1 favorite]


practically all of these would look great screenprinted onto a t-shirt - e.g. mitsouko
posted by Caxton1476 at 12:22 PM on March 19, 2020


Tavella, to paraphrase Agadmator: congratulations, you are a genius at deduction. Now please donʻt tell anyone, OK?
posted by Droll Lord at 5:41 PM on March 20, 2020 [1 favorite]


Pears, Cashmere Bouquet, and Lifebuoy are all at vermontcountrystore.com. Maybe Lava, too. We only had one bathroom for the five of us, so the Lava lived there. Unpleasant to use, ugly, and bad scent.

A few months ago, I was stoked to happen upon a bar of Magno La Toja at a Tshifffely's Pharmacy in D.C. VCS used to have it.
posted by jgirl at 7:36 PM on March 20, 2020 [1 favorite]


Does a small Sherlock victory dance and then is silent!
posted by tavella at 12:13 AM on March 21, 2020


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