~ CREATIVE SOAPMAKING ~
May
Silk Soaps
Floral and Fruit Scents
Wild, Weird, and Wonderful Soap Ads
My Soap and Lotion Books!
Contents
Silk in Soapmaking—Why?
Using Silk in Soapmaking
Using Floral Scents
Flowers-and-Silk Soap
Floral Soap with Coconut Milk
Using Fruit Fragrances
Soaps from the Past—Wild, Weird, and Wonderful Soap Ads
Silk in Soapmaking—Why?
Soap trade card depicting silk manufacture
We use silk in soap for the same qualities that make it attractive as a fabric. It gives a unique smooth texture to soaps, and also to lotions and other cosmetics.
Using Silk in Soapmaking
Nineteenth-century silk workers in Italy
Silk fiber or fabric for soapmaking must be 100% silk. Silk is tough, though—you can't just add silk roving to lye water and expect it to dissolve. Chop it fine and let it soak in the water for half an hour before adding the lye. Don't use too much.
If you're using fabric, use about one square inch of fabric per pound of oils in the soap. Fabric must be clean and free of sizing or other additives. Many soapmakers prefer to use undyed fabric, but others say it makes no difference. Wet the fabric down well before adding to the lye solution. It may dissolve faster if it's cut into strips.
It's less trouble to use silk products that have been adapted for soapmaking. Many soapmaking suppliers sell silk products of various kinds—silk amino acids or powder seem to be the most common. Use per vendor's directions.
Using Floral Scents
Natural floral scents may be essential oils, absolutes, or concretes—the differences have to do with how they're produced. They all tend to be expensive.
Floral fragrance oils, both single-note and blends, are numerous and varied. Some attempt to duplicate the actual scent of a particular flower. Some do this with considerable success, others are not realistic.
Some fragrance oils, such as sunflower or marigold, aim for the "idea" of a flower that actually has no scent, or no usable one.
Blending
Floral fragrances are lovely, but with no other elements in the blend, they can seem a bit flat. Here are some ideas for introducing complexity to florals.
Floral + musk makes a richer, warmer scent.
Floral + a "green" scent such as green tea or leafy fragrances. This is actually the way we perceive floral scents in nature, with a background leaf fragrance.
Floral + citrus lightens the sweetness and introduces a fresh note.
Mixed floral, or floral and herbal—such as rose + jasmine + lavender—produces a more natural effect than a single floral note.
More Considerations
It's always best to ask your vendor if a scent accelerates trace. They don't necessarily include this information in their catalogs.
Floral scents that are often said to accelerate trace include geranium essential oil, lilac fragrance oil, and peony fragrance oil. Some rose fragrance oils do, as well, and there may well be others. See August for suggestions for working with accelerants.
Some floral fragrances need to be soaped with low temperature techniques and not allowed to gel. If they overheat, the fragrance changes or disappears. Treat as you would milk soap.
Flowers-and-Silk Soap
Designed for minimum color and odor from oils. This mixture is fairly slow to trace, which should help with fragrances that accelerate trace, or with special effects such as swirling. The "silky" feel of the fiber imparts a similar effect to the soap, giving a luxurious texture.
9.9 ounces (281 grams) almond butter
10.2 ounces (289 grams) coconut oil
9.9 ounces (281 grams) almond oil
9 ounces (255 grams) water
1 gram silk fiber (a wad about the size of a pecan in the shell)
4.3 ounces (123 grams) lye
Fragrance or essential oil amount per vendor's recommendation
1. Chop the silk fiber into lengths of no more than half an inch. Finer is better. Soak in the water for 30 minutes before adding the lye. After adding it, stir until the silk is dissolved. Strain. (Or use silk amino acids or powder per vendor's directions instead of dissolving silk fiber in the lye solution)
2. Melt the almond butter and coconut oil together. Add to the almond oil.
3. Add the lye solution and blend to trace. Add fragrance. I would use about 2 ounces (57 grams) of most scents for this quantity of oils.
This soap is slow to trace. You may want to turn this to your advantage—for example, it may be a good choice for swirls or other special effects. Or you may want to speed trace by using some of the suggestions I mention for Castile soap in March.
This recipe and the Floral Soap with Coconut Milk that follows are nearly pure white, odorless soaps. The recipes are intended to give a palette for your ideas—natural colors, scents, swirling, botanicals—whatever sparks your creativity.
Floral Soap with Coconut Milk
This is a milk soap with no dairy product to compete with the floral scent. What little scent coconut milk naturally has is destroyed in saponification. Use Cool Technique for this one. Make sure your shea butter is refined, so there's no oil scent, either.
9 ounces (255 grams) coconut oil
18 ounces (510 grams) sunflower oil
3 ounces (85 grams) refined shea butter
9 ounces (255 grams) coconut milk
4.2 ounces (120 grams) lye
Fragrance or essential oil per vendor's recommendation
Using Fruit Fragrances
Fruit scents make lovely soaps for summer markets, but experiment carefully. Fruit fragrance oils may resemble hard candy more than fresh fruit.
Fruit fragrances are also plagued by discoloration, ricing, and acceleration.
Read reviews if vendors publish them. Also try the Soap Scent Review Board.
Blending
To blend fruit fragrances, for a start, think like a cook. Taste is mostly scent anyway, so if a combination of raspberry and orange appeals to you on a plate, you might also like it in a soap. Here are some possible combinations.
- multiple fruits
- fruit + floral
- fruit + spice
- fruit + vanilla
- fruit + herb
- fruit + chocolate
Either of the floral fragrance recipes given earlier would also be ideal for fruit fragrances, since both soaps are almost completely colorless and odorless before color and scent are added by the soapmaker.
Strained apple juice would make a good liquid for fruit-scented soaps. Use it frozen to prevent overheating of the fruit sugar. The juice will increase bubbly lather.
Don't use undiluted frozen juice concentrate—it's too sugary. The lye solution will overheat.
Soaps from the Past—Wild, Weird, and Wonderful Soap Ads
In the US, commercial soapmaking accelerated around the same time that advertising exploded. The result was more than a little interesting.
Early advertising emphasized hygiene and ease of use. Some of the hygiene claims seem wildly exaggerated, even fraudulent, until you remember that soap was about all people had for fighting disease organisms before antibiotics. Lifebuoy Soap's claim to save lives was probably about 90% hopefulness and wishful thinking—but the remaining 10% mattered a lot.
On the other hand, some claims were misleading and even dangerous. Soaps promised to keep away colds, or to prevent much more serious diseases. Advertisements of this kind resulted in the development of strict standards about health claims for soaps and cosmetics.
As science and medicine led to more effective disease control—and as regulations got tougher—soap advertising began to instead emphasize beauty and success. According to the ads, the soaps made it possible for women to find husbands and for men to find jobs. Failure to use a certain brand would result in body odor, rejection by friends and loved ones, and economic disaster, according to these ads.
Here again, soap was almost the only thing available for the purpose. Air conditioning was a thing of the future for most of this period. Clothes were concealing and restrictive. Underarm deodorants hadn't been invented—or weren't especially effective. But ads promoted various brands by suggesting that one or another kind of soap could make a major difference—a doubtful idea, when carried that far. Claims of this type wound up raising standards of personal and household cleanliness, building up expectations that then needed to be met.
A whole book could be written—at least one has, in fact—on this "stick and carrot" approach to selling soap. It's bare knuckles advertising, propaganda at its best (or worst). I think we, as soapmakers, need to keep this history in mind—especially when we're tempted to question the labeling laws it inspired.
Of course, not all soap advertising involved misrepresentation. Some of it was quite fun, like Sapolio's Spotless Town, with its amusing characters and little poems. Or the goofy jingles on the back of trade cards for Wrisley's White Borax Soap. You have to admire the humor and ingenuity of the people who produced them.
One of my favorite literary scenes occurs in Jack Finney's novel, Time and Again, which opens with a mid-twentieth-century commercial artist working on a soap advertisement. His boredom, disgust, and sense of wasting his life propel him to accept an offer to time travel to 1882. In the end, he decides to stay there. I wonder if he ended up working on soap ads in that period as well. Maybe he was the inventor of Spotless Town—you never know.
A note about dates I've given for the following soap ads: Some are exact—particularly dates of magazine and newspaper ads. Some are based on vendor claims of the age of paper ephemera. Some are based on research about the manufacturer. If all else failed, hints like dress and hair styles, popular typeface styles, and such contributed to an educated guess.
The Wild and the Weird
1870—Buchan's Carbolic Toilet Soap would probably have been similar to Lifebuoy, which also contained carbolic acid as its active ingredient. The fine print in the top right corner claims that it "cures all eruptions" (of the skin, presumably, not volcanic eruptions).
In days before regulation of claims, such statements were common. Carbolic soap is mildly disinfectant and may well be helpful with some irritations and minor infections, but it most definitely won't affect skin cancer.
1880—An early version of the before-and-after ad.
"Dirt and discomfort! Nothing clean!
Why don't this lady get Soapine?""Neat as a pin and sweet and clean
are all things since she had Soapine!"
Soapine was a whale blubber product that claimed not to be soap, to in fact be "better than soap." Most likely, it was soap. The whale was featured in all their early ads.
1880—Soap for All Nations—not a modest claim, but at least not harmful. It does reflect a certain narrow zeal, but the improbability of carrying it out most likely made it relatively harmless.
1885—"My mamma used Wool Soap!"
"I wish mine had!"
This ad for Wool Soap by Swift and Company suggests that shrinkage in wool is caused by choice of soap. Actually, the most important factor is water temperature. It's also unlikely that a shirt would shrink this much in one washing.
And then there's the implied hook—that the "good mother" uses the product, while the competitor's customer is a "bad mother" who not only ruins the shirt but leaves her child half nude.
1885—Lyons Sulfur Borax Soap "prevents the contraction of contagious diseases: DIPHTHERIA, TYPHOID, and all MALARIAL FEVERS."
Diphtheria is spread through the air, typhoid by contaminated water. Malaria is transmitted by certain mosquitoes.
How in the world could a laundry soap affect that?
1886—A nice poetic ad. I doubt if anyone really believed that Oakley's Queen soap would make them glad their vacation was over, but it's a nice thought.
There's a difference between painting a lovely picture and telling a downright lie—some ads manage to stay on the right side of that line. This one seems charming and quite harmless, even if it isn't exactly realistic.
1890—Here we have Fairbank's Soap, that "will keep off any cold," though the ad doesn't say how. Hand washing is useful for helping to prevent contagion, but it won't help once a person is sick.
1890—This trade card interested me because it was the earliest I've seen where the illustration was actually a picture of the soap itself. The card is probably late nineteenth-century, but it has a surprisingly modern look. The reverse side of the card lists the company's medicated soaps, but makes no claims for any of them.
1890—Many advertisements of the late nineteenth century used games, puzzles, toys, and amusing images to sell.
Some were educational—cards that could be collected, showing birds, presidents, scenes of many lands, trades and professions, or similar picture series.
Some had coupons and special offers, premiums and giveaways. The Larkin Company, manufacturer of Sweet Home Soap, used personal testimonials on the reverse of their trade cards, as well as premiums, buying clubs, and door-to-door sales.
Several companies vied for customers by offering paper dolls and play furniture—a hint that perhaps Victorian children were not quite so "unseen and unheard" as we may have thought.
1898—Maypole wasn't the only "soap dye." It probably did help refresh color, but that wasn't the extent of its claims. The back of this card says that Maypole Soap will dye any color, even black, without boiling. Any fiber, too—although at the time this soap was made, only natural fibers were available. According to the ad, results were of professional quality.
Having given home dyeing a try myself with the old Rit dyes, I doubt this. I suspect there are good reasons why dye soap no longer exists.
1900—Claims from two competing brands of laundry soap.
"No Rubbing . . . No Backache . . . No Sore Fingers . . . NO WASH BOARD"
"No Boiling! No Scalding! No Labor! And your Wash done in one half the time."
You have to wonder if the laundry just rose up and did itself!
1900—Monkey Brand Soap, which must have been an abrasive soap rather like Lava, claims to make "Tin like Silver, Copper like Gold, Paint like New, Crockery like Marble, Brass ware like Mirrors."
Whether anyone believed this beyond the purchase of more than one bar of soap, it's hard to say. But claims like this and the claims that were made for patent medicines about the same time (1880–1900) are a major reason why we have the labeling requirements we have today.
1901—"Have your laundress use only Ivory Soap. Furnish it yourself if necessary to make certain that she does use it."
Servants of all kinds, including laundresses, were more common when this ad appeared. But its appeal to class-consciousness is fairly open. It may have sold more soap to people who liked the idea behind the ad than to those who actually had a personal laundress.
1905—So, what have we here? The text claims that the child is eleven months old, and that her beautiful hair is a result of being washed with Resinol Soap.
Wig? Maybe.
Retouched photo? Possibly.
Older child? Probably. She looks more like eighteen months old than eleven.
Some kind of thickening treatment on the hair?
Unusual baby, illogical assumptions about the soap?
Resinol is still manufactured today and is not recommended for use on children under two years old except with a doctor's advice.
It also has nothing to do with luxuriant tresses. It's a soothing ingredient, recommended for chapped skin, poison ivy, and such. If it could stimulate hair growth, there would be no more male pattern baldness.
1910—An early floating soap. The text on the reverse side of this card makes many vague claims that this product is "the best," but none are exactly spelled out. The artwork is a good example of the subconscious thrust of advertising. The woman is attractive, young, and obviously well-off, judging by her clothing and furniture.
More than soap is being sold here, but soap is actually all you can buy. This is very common in advertising. We see it also in the mid-twentieth-century use of movie and sports stars in soap advertising. If such glamorous and successful people use a particular brand of soap, some of the glamor and success rubs off on the soap itself. There's no blatant claim that I'd become famous if I used the product, but I'm encouraged to think I might become more like one of these super-people if I did.
And of course, it doesn't happen.
1914—"A woman's looks count for so much more than a man's in the sum of life that she owes it to herself to do all that she reasonably can to preserve, and if possible enhance, whatever grace and charm of person nature may have endowed her with."
For the next several decades, variations on this theme of soap = beauty = female success will turn up in different forms, time and time again.
1925—No subtlety here . . . this one is outright fraud.
1928—Here's a response to women entering the business work force in larger numbers. Use Palmolive soap, because that complexion is worth money, honey.
1929—The 1920s began a trend that was to continue for several decades—featuring movie stars in soap ads. This full-page ad featured Clara Bow. She was a major star, appearing in 46 silent films and 11 talkies.
Whether she actually used Lux soap is another matter.
1939—"This is for always, Darling!"
"Nan hopes so, too! That's why she guards against dry, lifeless, 'middle-age' skin!"
So, if her marriage fails, it will be her own fault for not using Palmolive soap?
This is blatant fear-selling. It plays to the desire for love, and to insecurity about losing it. And to magical thinking that a soap ingredient could be the fountain of youth. If olive oil soap could guarantee perpetual beauty, undying love, and a happy life, the world would be a much simpler place.
1942—Shame-selling at its best. If you don't use the product, your underwear will tell on you!
1942—Brides are one of the most common images in mid-twentieth-century soap advertisements. The white dresses project an image of cleanliness—though, of course, wedding dresses aren't usually laundered. More than that, a bride at that time would have been a symbol of supreme womanly triumph, the dream realized. All due to her soap, of course.
This one is a bit different. In this little playlet, a new bride phones her mother with a dilemma—her husband isn't interested.
But Cashmere Bouquet soap flies to the rescue, with the lesson that soaps that control body odor don't have to have a mannish fragrance. Honeymoon saved!
1942—"Won't somebody love me?"
"Somebody very nice surely will . . . if you'll just discover the secret of bathing away body odor with one soap that will actually adorn your skin with a protective fragrance . . . a fragrance men love! It's no longer necessary to risk your daintiness with an unpleasant-smelling soap!"
Further panels in this ad for Cashmere Bouquet show a friend telling her the "secret," followed by the woman receiving an enormous diamond engagement ring from a handsome man.
That's a lot to get for the price of a bar of soap.
1943—Lux Soap: a woman's patriotic duty.
1949—"Don't let success pass you by! Use Lifebuoy!"
The undermining drumbeat wasn't confined to women. Many ads showed men being passed over for a job, raise, or promotion because they used the wrong soap.
Of course, if any one soap could deliver on the implied promises, there would be no need at all for any of the others.
1952—Here's a mid-twentieth-century ad that combines fear selling with shame selling.
"Dirt danger days" would probably be summer, when kids are likely to be outdoors. They do get grubby. This is normal, not dangerous, of course. Recent research suggests it's necessary for healthy development of the immune system.
A small justification for the idea of keeping children healthy by keeping them clean might be that, when this ad appeared, it was only the first year the polio vaccine was offered to the public. Before that, children might be suddenly struck with the disease, which seemed to be more prevalent in summer. Parents must have been very afraid of it, and must have done everything they could to make their children safe. However, it is too contagious to be prevented by soap.
The idea of dirt = danger is an effective hook for selling soap, especially when there's a bit of guilt thrown in: "If your child gets sick, it's because you, a bad parent, didn't wash him enough with our product."
1960—"The soap for people who like people . . .
"Dial—Don't you wish everyone did?"
Another subliminal appeal to insecurity and fear. Many products were marketed this way, not just soap—mouthwash, deodorant, shampoo—anything to do with personal hygiene.
And the Wonderful
1889—Here's one ad that seems to laugh at the whole idea of advertising.
1901—And here they are—some of the residents of Spotless Town.
These fun-loving ads were famous, and they must have sold tons of soap. And they made no outrageous claims at all.
1901—This beautiful ad for Ivory Soap makes no special claims except that they believe you'll like it if you try it. Fair advertising at its best, from an era when outrageous claims were common.
1903—And finally, an ad that promises the only thing we can claim today—that soap will get you clean.
One Last Thought
There is no link between hard-line advertising and a brand's survival. Some of the most "gentlemanly" advertisers are the companies that have lasted for over a century. And many of the less ethical ones have not stayed in business—or if they have, they've changed their tone completely. Underhanded advertising does not bring success.