Lather me than you: the joy of soap

By Catherine Nixey

Few foresaw that the apocalypse would be so soapy. Ever since Death galloped through the Book of Revelations on his pale horse, plague at his heels, our imaginings of End Times have tended towards the gritty.

Apocalypse-preppers hoard camouflage gear and crossbows. The post-Armageddon novel has bristled with weapons since Mary Shelley’s “The Last Man”. Pandemic films like “28 Days Later” (critics declared it “muscular” and “virile”) are packed with manly gun-toting, lawless looting and artful daubs of dirt on people’s cheekbones. It’s all very butch.

Judged by the aesthetic requirements of the genre, the coronavirus outbreak has been something of a let-down. After Boris Johnson, the British prime minister, attended his first high-level emergency meeting about the pandemic in March, his plea to the public had nothing to do with looting or riots. “The best thing you can do is to wash your hands with soap and hot water”, he said, “while singing ‘Happy Birthday’ twice.” You wouldn’t find that kind of talk in Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road”.

On the high street, the pandemic was felt not through smashed windows but the relentless depletion of handwashing products. Soap sales surged in the weeks following the virus’s arrival in Britain, and sanitiser purchases rocketed, up 255% on the same period in 2019.

The white heat of technology may have blazed over the 20th century, but the dampening realisation of 2020 has been that our chief weapon against a new disease is a solution perfected in the Victorian period: to make things wet with soap and water.

Much of what we know about how washing works is the result of an ardent female scientist being banished to the kitchen in the late 19th century

Soap has inspired few paeans since becoming part of our everyday lives in the 19th century. To the extent that anyone got excited about it all in recent years, it was as an occasion for chic packaging (nobody forks out almost $40 for an amber bottle of Aesop’s “resurrection aromatique” because they believe it’s the most efficient way to remove dirt). As with many other aspects of life, however, the events of 2020 are forcing a re-appraisal.

Why have we for so long overlooked the joy of suds? It’s partly to do with identity politics. Bacteria and viruses do not cling more lovingly to hands that possess two X chromosomes; dirt is not more attracted to women. Yet the history of soap is bound up with age-old stereotypes: a purified version of femininity versus the muscular dirt of the true male. Soap, it turns out, is a feminist issue.

Just think about the marketing. Dove, one of the world’s biggest soap brands, shows 11 images of clean-looking people on the home page of its website – not one of them is male. In recent years Dove’s TV and billboard adverts have self-consciously celebrated “real” women of all shapes, sizes and colours over skinny blonde models. “We can choose beautiful for ourselves,” the soap brand exhorts. “It’s not anyone’s right, but our own.” The inclusive agenda does not seem to extend to men (whose skincare needs are discreetly acknowledged behind a separate tab on Dove’s home page).

Women do seem to be a bit more interested in personal hygiene than men. An American survey in 2005 found that only 75% of men wash their hands after using the loo, whereas 90% of women do. This is hardly surprising given that for centuries women have been soft-soaped into believing that suds are their strong suit. For most of human history, society has relied on them to do the unpaid labour of cleaning – dishes, clothes, children. Their aspirations – and handwashing habits – have been shaped accordingly.

Much of what we know about how washing works is, in fact, the indirect result of an ardent female scientist being banished to the kitchen in the late 19th century. Agnes Pockels was a clever, hard-working girl from Germany. She would have loved to go to university, but instead, when her younger brother went off to study science, she stayed at home to care for her parents, read her brother’s cast-off textbooks and wash dishes.

As Pockels stared into the sink day after day, she started to think about why the grease moved across the dish when she added soap. With some rudimentary experiments, she came up with a way to measure surface tension, and wrote to a British scientist with her observations. He immediately realised the brilliance of her work, and sent it on to the journal Nature. Pockels’s letter was printed in March 1891, beneath the British scientist’s note introducing her as “a German lady, who with very homely appliances has arrived at valuable results”.

It’s now a product that improves moods, smooths wrinkles and soothes the female brow

Those observations were the foundation for a branch of chemistry now called “surface science”. Its researchers seek to understand how one thing sticks to another – including viruses. They’re in quite a lot of demand these days.

The basic recipe for soap has been around for millennia. One of the earliest records of the formula comes from Pliny the Elder, a Roman writer, who observed the Celts using a mixture “prepared from tallow and ashes” to give “a reddish tint to the hair”. Pliny, perhaps unfamiliar with ginger colouring, was confused about causality. But he was right about the ingredients. To make soap, you mix some form of fat with an alkali (which is what ashes produce in water).

There is a marvellous alchemy to this. Take two things that seem the epitome of filth – ash and animal fat – and, as if by magic, they combine to make something that cleanses. Small wonder that soap was once considered almost divine.

Nowadays the alkalis are synthesised, but the resulting soap molecules still look much the same, “like a sperm”, says Andrea Sella, professor of chemistry at University College London. “They’ve got a head,” he says, expanding an analogy that has yet to trouble a Dove advert, “and then these long oily tails.” The heads are attracted to water, and the tails to fat and grease. This means that when they encounter a recalcitrant bit of muck, soap molecules bundle around it like a SWAT team, tails in, heads out, creating a smooth sphere that is easily washed away by water.

The attack is two-pronged: the soap molecules also disrupt the delicate membranes of viruses and bacteria, causing them to disintegrate. Though some soap is trumpeted as “antibacterial”, attacking bacteria is almost the definition of what soap does. People shouldn’t worry about sharing soap bars either, says Sella: “The soap itself will typically dismember the stuff that ends up on it.”

The history of soap is rich not just with misogyny but racism

This basic chemical process works the same way no matter what form the product takes: cheap slabs of Pears, bottled liquids, $2,800 nuggets of diamond-dusted Qatar soap. The only variable that affects performance is the concentration. Use a lot: things get clean. Don’t, and they won’t.

Soap is one of the most important inventions of mankind, yet it took a while to catch on. Pliny considered it to be “very useful” but he wasn’t a wholly reliable witness. (Just before explaining soap he offered a number of recipes to cure sores on the skin. These included warmed urine, cow dung served hot with vinegar and the testes of a fox.) In general the Romans found Celts unconvincing advertising material: they associated the people of northern Europe with savagery, ugliness and bad weather. So despite Pliny’s enthusiasm, Rome continued its old washing habit, cleaning things with human pee. Such is the fine line between civilisation and barbarism.

The usefulness of soap for personal hygiene was not properly understood until the 19th century, when the stench and filth of the sewage-filled Thames river in London prompted a revolution in public health and sanitation. Even then it took a serious marketing push to make soap popular. Had early adverts explained that their product was the salt of a fatty acid, made from the vestiges of the meat-packing industry, it might not have flown off the shelves.

Soap manufacturers realised early that dreams sell and fear does not (until you arrive at a pandemic, of course). Pears’ Soap led the way in hawking soap as an aspirational item (at some point it decided that dropping the apostrophe would help, too). In the 1880s the company hired London’s most glamorous it-girl, Lillie Langtry, as the first woman to endorse a commercial product. An early advert for Pears shows Langtry holding up a bar which, she declares, is “matchless for the hands and complexion”.

Soap sellers have been trumpeting the beautifying properties of their bars ever since. “Want to be attractive?” asks a particularly blunt advert for Lux from 1942. Course you do. A Palmolive ad from the 1940s shows a picture of a woman smiling coyly at the camera. “I love my husband far too much”, the speech bubble rising from her mouth says, “to risk getting dry, lifeless, ‘middle-aged’ skin.”

“Want to be attractive?” asks a particularly blunt advert for Lux from 1942. Course you do

As this particular idea of femininity was being embedded in Western society, a complementary idea of masculinity was also emerging: skin smeared with sweat and grime. Photographers like Bill Brandt and, later, Earl Dotter, represent key reference points for this vision of manhood: the blackened faces of the men they pictured seamed with the exhaustion of virile labour. The advent of metrosexual man has shifted expectations only a little. Though women merely glow, as the saying goes, men are encouraged to produce all the perspiration they want. Adverts for everything from Coca-Cola to Calvin Klein show them slippery with the stuff.

Our language reflects this idea too: “getting in a lather”, “soft-soaping” and “frothy” are all expressions used to belittle something. Showing grit, by contrast, is to be commended. There’s another grubby side to all this cleanliness, too, as the history of soap is rich not just with misogyny but racism: the idea that black skin somehow needed to be scrubbed clean. An early advert for Pears showed a black baby stepping into a bath and stepping out, miraculously white. That trope persisted for a long time.

Over the years, soap sellers have changed their pitch to women. These days the product is no longer marketed primarily as a way of becoming more attractive to the opposite sex. It’s now a product that improves moods, smooths wrinkles and soothes the female brow. Imperial Leather promises to “help you relax and unwind so you can wash all those troubles away and focus on some me-time”.

These campaigns are ostensibly more empowering, but the subtext remains fundamentally conservative. Women may be frustrated at home with numerous children, exhausted by the double demands of housework and the office but, the ads whisper, what they really need is not equality, feminism or their husband to shift a bit. They need a nice bar of soap and a bath.

In purely financial terms, investing a basic cleaning product with so much cultural baggage has been extraordinarily successful. Each year we spend more on soap and bath concoctions – even before the pandemic caused a run on cleaning products, the global market for such goods was worth more than $40bn.

Yet much of this frenetic soaping may be unnecessary, according to James Hamblin, a doctor and author of “Clean: the New Science of Skin”. “Five years ago, I stopped showering,” his book begins. Hamblin argues that we’ve all been duped. We’d be just fine if we stop washing with the fervour we’ve been taught to adopt. In many ways we might be better off.

As we have cleansed and scrubbed and scoured our skin with increasing zest, conditions such as psoriasis and eczema have become more common. Not all bacteria are the baddies that the sanitary revolution led us to believe. Improved understanding of the microbiome is leading to an increased respect for what is in our gut. What if the grubbiness on our skin is just as vital?

Hamblin (as his patients may be relieved to hear) does wash his hands. But look closer at the market for soap and bath products, and you’ll see that handwashing has only ever accounted for a tiny fraction of it. And here, as the pandemic rolls on and we stare down at our hands, knuckles rubbed raw from all the washing, skin flaky from the alcohol gel that we so regularly apply, we come full circle to the collapse of civilisation as we know it.

Soap doesn’t wipe away our troubles. It is not an elixir of youth, or a salve for the beaten-down and weary. That’s all froth. Soap simply saves lives, sud after glorious sud.■

Images: Getty, Bridgeman