Imagine, you are a housewife living in the 1920s or 1930s. Money is tight and you do everything you can to make ends meet. You make your own soap when you can, and occasionally you have a bar of Sunlight Soap, but it is still important to eek out what you have. The children left the soap in the bathwater this morning and now there is only a skeric left, just enough to add to the soap saver. Boy will they be in trouble when they get home!
When I took this soap saver to show the children, they had absolutely no idea what it was, or even what the left over soap inside was. They are used to soap used for washing up coming as a liquid or powder and even though they have used bars of soap, they see them as disposable, simply throwing them out when they are almost gone. The children had never seen anything at all like the soap saver, and most assumed it was a cage used for cooking in hot oil or stock. One even suggested that the soap inside was the 'long dead' remains of somebody's dinner!
Soap has probably been around for as long as people have been eating and doing dirty things. At first, people probably used water to wash, and clean sand would have been used to remove 'tough stains'. After that animal fats mixed with ash and other ingredients began to be used as soap. Indeed, the child who suggested that the soap was the remains of dinner may well have been closer to the truth than they realised. Soap was very expensive to buy, so many families made their own, using the lard (fat) left over from slaughtered animals or even roasted joints of meat. Others sold the lard to soap factories, in exchange for soap.
Despite this long history, soap as we recognise it is actually a relatively new invention. It was a French chemist by the name of Nicholad LeBlanc who in 1791 created a process to allow the large scale production of soap. He worked out a way to cheaply make large quantities of soda ash, which was a key ingredient in making soap. Once he had invented the process soap making became a viable trade and before too long soap companies began to spring up, many of which are still around today! In fact, it was in the late 1700s and early 1800s that Pears, Sunlight, Palmolive, Lux and Ivory soap were created. However, bought soap was still a luxury and could not afford to be wasted. As a result, tools like soap savers began to emerge, making it possible to use up even the smallest scraps of soap. You can still buy plastic versions of soap savers and older people often still use them. The soap saver I showed the children belonged to my Great Grandmother and she was using it right up until she died! If you would like to learn more about the history of soap, click here.