How to Make Shower Gel from Bar Soap - or Not!
It’s International Bath Day (which is apparently a thing!) and it got us thinking about the time we thought to extend our product range with shower gel. We often get asked about bar soap vs liquid soap for hand washing, and whether it’s better to use shower gel or bar soap for body wash. There are no definitive answers to these questions, but read on for our tried and tested conclusion.
While studies find little difference between bar and liquid soap in their antibacterial or cleansing effect, dermatologists suggest bar soaps may be less likely to breed mould or bacteria that can lead to skin diseases (eg athlete’s foot), given they are waterless and solid. Bar soaps also tend to be more natural with less ingredients and thus less possible allergens. Meanwhile, liquid soaps or shower gels, while less natural on the whole, may have a pH that is closer to the pH of skin (4.5-5.75) and therefore be less likely to irritate dry or sensitive skin types.
At Oriwa Naturals, we have many clients with sensitive skin using our Soap Shampoo Conditioner Bars and telling us they’re the only bars that have helped them, yet we wanted to create an option for those with excessively dry skin or skin issues like eczema and dermatitis. Was there a reason shower gels tended to have more synthetic ingredients and be less natural? We’d heard of people making shower gel from their pre-made natural bar soaps so we thought—why not give that a try?
Why not, indeed.
Before an Oriwa Naturals product is released to the public, it is crafted, perfected, trialled, tested, tested by others, given feedback (wash, rinse, repeat!) several times. It can be months or even years before a product is given a label and appears on our website. Having made our Soap Shampoo Conditioner Bars successfully and with little fuss, we thought making liquid soap would be a piece of, well—cake!
For us, it was also about sustainability. Our Soap Shampoo Conditioner Bars are already a very sustainable option. There is less packaging required for bar soaps (than the plastic bottles used for shower gels) and the packaging we do use is plastic-free. In addition, unlike many large soap production companies, we use natural, sustainable, and locally-sourced ingredients. This is important as one significant issue in sustainability right now is the 10 million tonnes of metal salt fatty acids for soaps that are manufactured every year, and have increased as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. In most cases, these fatty acids are tallow and palm oil, both of which leave a large global footprint. Consequently, the soap industry is under pressure to try to reduce the total fatty matter (TFM) of soaps in order to make them more sustainable while trying not to compromise the quality of their soap—which is difficult as soap really should have a high TFM.
At Oriwa Naturals, we have an easy answer to soap sustainability: switch to sustainable ingredients and shop local. The fatty acid in our Soap Shampoo Conditioner Bars comes from 100% natural extra virgin olive oil grown and provided locally by Robinson’s Bay Olives. This means that we are using a natural, sustainable source for our ingredients, and we have a significantly reduced global footprint as we are not ordering oil to be shipped from overseas so we can happily keep our soaps top-quality with a safely high TFM.
We saw the addition of a natural shower gel to our product line as a way of increasing our
sustainability by using up our soap seconds—the bars that set slightly warped or that break before packaging. We also thought if we didn’t end up manufacturing the gel to sell, or if we didn’t have enough second to make it in large supply, we could release the recipe to our clients. Making shower gel from bar soap—what a great way to use up all those soap ends in your shower that you would normally throw away!
We did our research, worked on several recipes, and studied everything carefully. The recipes looked good, the process simple. Pop the soap bars in a saucepan. Fill with X amount of water, bring to boil. When it had all melted down, add glycerine. Allow to cool. The liquid should be thick and—voila, liquid soap!
So here was how it played out….
1st try – nope. The ‘gel’ was the consistency of water, all sloppy and liquid. We’d never be able to wash with this! Terrible.
2nd try – added less water. Nope. Consistency of water = terrible. Come on!
3rd try – added even less water. No again. Consistency of water = terrible. What is going on here?
We contacted another soap maker and asked them what we were doing wrong. Why couldn’t we get the gel to thicken??
“Oh you need to add a special shampoo thickener: caprylic glyceride”. (Now, why didn’t we hear about that in our recipe research??) We bought the thickener.
4th try – added the thickener. STILL the consistency of water = terrible. Why why why??
Perhaps we should add the thickener when the shower gel is cold…?
5th try – added thickener when it had cooled down. Consistency of water = terrible terrible!
By this time, we had a lot of liquid soap the consistency of water and, in stubbornness, our
manufacturer was determined to use it all! (Waste not what not, right?) So we poured this ‘liquid’ soap into a very large empty shampoo bottle in the shower. We used it on body and hair for weeks. It seemed to work perfectly but was so thin it went everywhere—with only so much actually going on us!
After about 4 weeks we opened the bottle to have a look and, we kid you not, it was full of mould! That’s right, folks. We’d been stubbornly washing in mouldy gel.
We imagined the mould came about as a result of all the water in the gel and the lack of chemical preservatives combined with heat and humidity in the shower… We never had this problem with our bar soaps!
Aaaand that’s when we gave up.
Our Communications Manager remembers a similar situation when she tried to make homemade aioli. After a kitchen covered in little jars of separated egg yolk and vinegar, she wrote “just [bleeping] buy the stuff!” across the recipe in her cookbook. She was not
wrong.
Bar soaps can, in fact, be designed to have a lower pH level so, once we have recovered from our shower gel experiment, we will be going back to the drawing board to design ourselves a bar soap specifically for sensitive skin. Sign up to our mailing list to be the first to hear about it when it launches!
And finally, our answer to how to make shower gel from bar soap? Stick to the bar soap.
