Soap Immortal (Soap Making)

Member Name: sharrowing

Product:	Soap Making
Date:	02/05/02 (208 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Save pennies a year

Disadvantages: Requires patience

My Nan makes soap.

Not the fancy kind like you buy in shops like Lush, all colourful and textured and looking good enough to eat. My Nan uses an age-old technique, no doubt taught to her by HER grandmother, called "saving up all the old slivers of soap to make a brand new bar."

This, quite simply, is genius.

Everyone hates the last few days of a bar of soap. The once proud bar sits forlornly in the dish, cracked, discoloured, it's Imperial Leather sticker peeling and faded. Trying to use it for even rudimentary ablutions is a minefield. Will it crack in two during vigorous lather production? Will it get trodden on, and secure itself limpet-like to the floor of the bath? Will it fade into nothing at a vital juncture of your cleaning regime, forcing you to locate and unwrap a fresh bar whilst only partially washed? A nightmare, I'm sure you'll agree.

Rather than let these veterans of the bath chamber end their days in such ignominy, my grandmother lifts them from the soap dish just before the lean times begin. After a few gentle words, she places it into a tray with others of its kind. There the down-on-its-luck sliver of soap finds new purpose, a new reason for cleaning. Its horizons are widened by mingling with soaps of many other cultures and backgrounds in a truly classless society.

A little water mixed in the tray allows the soaps to mix and mingle freely while still maintaining their unique identities. After a few days (weeks?) the soaps harden together into a new, unique, multi-faceted bar. Ready to take pride of place in the bathroom.

This new bar of soap is not bound by the conventions of its factory manufactured brethren. It revels in its multiple personalities. Here brown and transparent remnants of Pears, there green and unassuming traces Palmolive.

Anyone using this new bar is in for some other pleasant surprises. Early morning face-washes occasionally bring to the su
rface many hairs of interesting shape and unknown origin. The experience of pulling such a hair from one's lips is always a wonderful way to waken the wits and sharpen the mind in the early hours.

My grandmother has not seen fit to impart to me the arcana and artistry of this method of soap creation. Possibly this knowledge only travels down the distaff side of a family. I look forward to the day I can provide a grand-daughter, so that she to can be tutored in this time-honoured form of recycling.

A final thought. Each re-manufactured bar is itself placed into the tray of rebirth when its time comes. Therefore basic science tells us that some miniscule portion of the bar my Nan creates today comes from a proto-bar made by some distant ancestor many generations ago. When we wash with it, we are, in effect, washing with history.

Maybe some of the hairs within contain the DNA of my great-great-great-great-great grandmother? It's a provocative thought.

So I urge you to start making soap this way, if you can learn how. If nothing else it may be your one shot at true immortality.

P.S. I remind readers that due to an oversight by DooYoo, there is no "useless" option when rating opinons. I suggest using the "Crown" button to alert the authorities to the shocking lack of useful information in this review.

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