Lavarse Sus Manos

One of my favorite bars in Pacific Beach/San Diego was Lavas Sus Manos. Turns out there's lots of ways to say 'wash your hands' in Spanish. In the bathrooms where I work there are recently posted papers on the doors that have instructions how to wash one's hands. First of all, people won't see it after the first glance, and nobody will read it. It did get me thinking about soap though.

The ancient Greeks and Romans didn't use soap. They preferred slathering their hair and skin with gloopy oils. Ahhhh, the joy of massaging pig fat into your hair. It must have been a wonderful experience. The oil they put on their skin they scrapped off, taking away a little bit of dirt. It turns out the oil and soap have many of the same ingredients; they're mostly composed of fatty oils. The earliest recorded soap usage is about five thousand years ago, and the sapindus tree (also known as soapberry or soapnut) was used before that. The source of the actual recipe for the first soap used is unknown.

Here's the recipe. Take some ashes and pour water through them until you get lye water. Lye water is made alkaline by the addition of potassium hydroxide. You put an egg in the solution to test if it's ready; if the egg floats you're good to go. You then add fat to it. Animal fat was used a lot, but olive oil is better. Start mixing the ashes and fat; doesn't make any difference if this process is done hot or cold. The chemical reaction is called saponification. This is just the molecules rearranging themselves as they change from oil and alkali to a form of sugar call glycerol and the final ingredient, soap. These get separated. This process sometimes happens naturally. There's been cases where it's happened to buried corpses. It's just because of the way the soil, worms and bacteria mix. Just thought I'd share.

Soaps today use plant oils such as palm or olive, instead of animal fats. A few extra ingredients are added so we smell nice. Sometime scouring agents like pumice are added to clean away dead skin cells. The reason soap cleans is because of the chemical reaction; long and complicated having to do with how the potassium and salts and water and...you get the picture.

There you have it, the oily story. Now if we can just get some people that don't use it after....