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Comment by pskiba | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how effective this soap is when used as a cleaning agent compared to commercial options.

If you have too much lye in it, it will be ridiculously "effective", as its caustic basic property will hurt your skin. Too much tallow, and you essentially just smear fat on yourself.

No real reason why this, blended well to a reasonable pH level, would not be as effective as what we have today.

Further, it's likely our society places a disproportionately large emphasis on "super-effective" cleaning agents.

We don't need to wipe off every drop of our skin oil every day in order to eliminate bad smells or function regularly and healthfully around others.

Your skin has oils. It's a good thing to be on the oil side of the balance. If you're on the other side the excess lye is making more soap out of you.

Everlasting soap?

This is a legitimate cold processed soap recipe, just like you’d buy at a fancy store or farmers market. Unfortunately most “soap” you buy in stores is actually a detergent bar, which is much stronger.

This comment sent me down a mini rabbit-hole to find the differences between soap & detergent: https://www.nycoproducts.com/resources/blog/simple-science-t...

I've made soap using tallow I rendered at home and lye from the hardware store. It works great! I'm not sure what purpose the salt or flour serves.

Probably not as good, but still somewhat effective. There seems to be an entire niche of artisanal soap makers out there at every farmers market/craft fare hawking their olive/palm/whatever soaps that smell of tobacco and cedarwood sea foam.... from what I’ve used of them, they work, just not as well/completely.

Generally, I think artisanal soapmakers buy lye flakes rather than making it from ash. Fundamentally, you need lye, water, and fat (or oil). Usually I think vegetable oils are used, rather than animal fat.

You can get beef suet quite cheaply at a butcher; I think I paid $2/lb or less. This is easily rendered into beautiful white tallow, which in turn makes a lovely soap. You can mix in some olive or coconut oil if you like, but there's no technical reason you can't use pure animal fat to make soap.

It may reduce your potential customers a bit, especially at a particularly crunchy farmer's market, but the soap will be fine :)

Proctor & Gamble was founded in Cincinnati near the slaughterhouses where tallow was readily available. William Proctor made candles and James Gamble made soap. https://news.pg.com/blog/procter-meets-gamble

Procter

Most soaps use tallow (beef fat) as it's the cheapest and most plentiful fat, due to the beef industry making a lot of it. But vegetable oil-based is the more "attractive" soap; it's generally modified to be softer on the skin and causes less harsh reactions than tallow, and of course there's vegan soap.

We make soap at home, from vegetable oils, lard and other fats. Just basic cold-process stuff, erring ever so slightly on the side of over-fatted soap.

It works great, it cleans well and I haven't had any issues with dry skin since we started using it.

The only real downside is that we get a bit of soap scum in the shower, but it's manageable.

This is essentially Savon de Marseille. Some still swear by it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marseille_soap

How so? That page says Marseille Soap is made from vegetable oils, whereas the recipe in the article uses animal fat.

Animal fat is also allowed in Savon de Marseille as long as it qualifies under regulation CE 1774/2002 on the use of animal derivatives for cosmetics.

The point is that it's a very plain soap and goes back to the 14th century.

(I had linked to the English wikipedia article but it's the French one that has more details, sorry for the confusion.)

That’s essentially any “pre-industrial” bar of soap.

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