33 flashback: soapilog

I'd been putting this off a long time. Almost a year. I grabbed the gallon jug of distilled white vinegar and headed to the basement. In one of the bags in the shameful congregation of unsorted detritus that I'm perpetually trying to get under control for once and for all in "my" section of the basement, in a jumbo ziploc are a dozen or so creamy, irregular cubes about two inches a side. They are the outcome of the soap experiment, the article about which is republished next. This is very typical of me: reading about it, preparing it, actually cooking up homemade soap, all very interesting to me. Having the soap, not as much. I mean, there are tons of soap and detergent in the house. Run of the mill bar soap. Fancy skin soap Jennie buys, thick translucent bars. Liquid soap. Dish soap. Soap is cheap and readily available. Hand made soap makes sense only in being something expensive and fancy, and there is nothing fancy about the soap I made. It is about as basic as you can get, and pretty damn haphazard at that.

This latter quality is what's up with the jug of vinegar, incidentally. When I carried out the soap experiment, I had some problems getting the product to trace - develop the swirls and tracks of semisolidity that indicates the appropriate chemical balance between fats and lye has been reached. A proper soapmaker would, at that point, have tossed the batch, I imagine. Reviewed the recipe, bought a better balance (my cheap spring-driven postage scale was totally inadequate to the job). I just mixed more lye and started fooling around. Eventually it worked out, but I have a persistent fear that tracks and pockets of lye remain in the final product, waiting to scar me. After a year of mellowing this seems pretty unlikely... but then again, once upon a time, long ago, I studied chemistry: I have had a reasonably serious chemical burn or two in my day. Base burns tend to slow, deep and persistent. If my skin starts to burn, some brisk scrubbing in vinegar ought to neutralize the reaction.

So, I selected a likely looking chunk. I changed the cat box, on the theory that it would make me feel more enthusiastic about washing my hands (plus it was a few days overdue, the cats were starting to kick out an ever widening circle of litter in protest). I washed my hands.

It was soap. It lathered, it cleaned. The lather was a little bit more slimy than foamy, no doubt the P&G set have a cunning toolbox of chemicals with tricky names to make that perfect bubbly foam. There was no burning, the vinegar was not required. My hands felt clean. It is drying to the skin, I note. If you had to use this soap every day it would be very tough on the skin, I imagine. I left the chunk in the nasty improvised soap dish on the ledge of the laundry sink and called the experiment a success.

this is what is up with this.