I examined a bar of soap today. A bar, that it seems, I only opened a week ago. It is a painfully thin pale blue. Worn away like only a soap bar that is frequently used, can be. Despite being nothing like a freshly cracked open bar of soap, it is still quite recognisable for what it is – just old soap.

Accompanying it in the soap dish were two other withered bars, a brownish cake soap (round) and another similar bar but in one of those apple green colours. I thought about how I might unify them to make a bigger bar.

The green bar is a Haman Neem Tulsi and aloe vera bar, the brown one claims to be sandalwood. Both are made in India. One by a well known global manufacturer and the other by something perhaps a bit more exclusive, the packaging seemed exlcusive, cellphane wrapped with a seal, in a cardboard box. Neither particularly impressed me, but then again, how does a soap bar impress?

This blue bar is made in Indonesia under  the brand Dettol, it was part of a buy 4 get one free deal. I wonder if that signifies anything particular about the quality of the bar? Particularly in relation to how long it is likely to last. My experience is that fresh soap cakes don’t last quite as long as those that are bit shriveled and older.

I chose the Dettol soap it for its anti bacterial properties, not for its aroma, look or brand. It is pretty much a utilitarian buy. I love the tingle on my skin from what I can only assume to be the anti bacterial properties, so I will likely buy it again.

In the US and Europe I would pretty much always buy discounted milled soap from France. Bars can be easily bought from TJMaxx and TKMaxx for the equivalent of two or three dollars a bar and they are chonky, almost always north of 100g – often as much as 200g or 300g.

I miss those substantial bars. I haven’t found them available here at a reasonable price point so I will likely do without them and be forced to remain content with these small bars with a shorter life span.

The remnants of three bars combined, leaves me with this hippy like rainbow bar. Still not likely 100g. I wonder how many bars I could go through and combine to reach 100g?

It’s funny because it is something I remember from my youth., these slivers of older bars all blending into one another like melted wax crayons left out in the sun. A couple of memories flood back on soap and my childhood.

When my maternal grandmother passed away in the mid 1970s one of the sets of items recovered were old bars of yellowed hard cheese like looking cakes. They looked like rough hewn stones and were uneven and rough, they smelled very carbolic as I recall. It was suggested that they were souvenirs from the Boer War, I think that unlikely. My grandmother was a babe in arms in  a concentration camp at that time and anything like soap was most likely to be used or eaten by the miserable souls interned by the British invaders. I rather doubt that they had been conserved! My family has a reputation for being a bit of an organized gang of pack-rats though, so who knows really?

My Ouma, as she was known, raised my mother in the depression era on the mines near Potchefstroom where my Oupa worked. It could have been from then, but I think that’s unlikely too.

No, what is probably closer to the truth is that they were humble ordinary soap cakes made or bought as part of a larger batch, cut or broken up and simply missed when packed into the laundry cupboard and just never used.

Storing soap in one’s underwear drawer or between sheets and pillowcases is something my family seems to have always done, and it is something even I do. There are probably half a dozen reasons why one might do this, the main reason being to have the cakes dry out a little to last a bit longer. Old family habits are hard to break it seems.

The interesting thing about some soap though, is that when it is made with certain oils and of a particularly high fat content it goes rancid. I never knew about this until about ten years ago. I always just thought some soap was better than other soaps. As a road warrior I would always bring home all the complementary soap bars from the lodgings I would stay at, some would remain in my valise and others would find their way to the linen closet or underwear drawer. About ten years ago when repacking the laundry cupboard of towels and sheets I happened upon a bunch of those hotel soaps and i found them to be nasty. They had turned.

A cake of soap in a hotel, though, even a small one leaves me with a sentimental feeling still to this day and even the cheap ones will come home with me to be used on a “you never know when you might need it” day. My mother even had to have a glass bowl in the bathroom where she would accumulate these (remember pack rat) though in later years bath gel, shampoo and conditioner seemed more common than small cakes of soap.

Soap of my youth typically amounted to a 225g oval soap cake, the shape of a giant fish oil softgel. Drop that on your foot in the shower and you knew you had dropped the soap!

This Dettol equivalent was a carbolic soap from my youth, the most commonly bought one being lifebouy. The most sophisticated of household of course would never dream of putting out lifebouy for guests, though the bar size was comparable with these 100g bars you would have to go for something more refined, like a nice rose scented milled soap from South Africa or Europe perhaps.

Clothes washing soap came in two varietals, powder or bar soap again. The powders most commonly available were Surf and OMO. Others likely existed but I don’t remember them.

Surf was popular but OMO had a reputation for being good for cold water washing. For good hard washing, nothing beat a bar of sunlight bar soap. Later this would be displaced by a similar green bar soap made by Olivine industries. Once every couple of months we would buy these long grooved bars by the case and I would be tasked with cutting them up into even bars for rationed use, wielding a half meter of soap bar would just be ridiculous.

I can still remember their jade like colour, the heaviness of the odor when you unwrapped them from the waxed paper and the little bit of give that they afforded when cut them up with a bread knife. In later years they would lose their glorious colour and show up in a muddy brown colour, a bit less aroma but with the same texture and satisfying cut through.

These days it is also liquid soaps but sometimes i think back to those simpler times and wonder whether they were really any better or worse.