Why does a bar of soap end up different from what it started as?
If you are cheap or lazy enough (a little of each in my case) and you let a bar of soap get really small, what you have at the end is much different from what you started with. The color is kind of icky, it is hard and brittle and does not lather as well. Do the manufacturers put this stuff in the middle of the soap or is this just a residue of material that does not dissolve as easily?
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7 Answers
My soap is the same all the way to the end. It gets smaller but never changes color.
Maybe soap can expire, and that’s just the part that stays around the longest.
We should try using a new piece of soap just a bit, to get any potential protective layers off, and then leave it out for as long as it takes to get another piece of soap to that weird-coloured brittle stage. And then compare the two.
Or maybe that’s how the entire bar starts out in the factory, and then in a next phase the soaps are submerged in some substance that doesn’t always permeate all the way to the core. A substance that gives the soap its colour and non-brittleness.
i think it’s manufactured that way, to give the first 80% a better surface and feel.
That or once the surface-area-to-volume-ratio gets high enough oxidation gets all funky on that bad boy.
It goes hard and brittle cause it has dried out , a good soak under water will soften it up again . Some soaps have a core different to the outer , but again chances are this is filth and nothing to do with the soap itself .
Neat I’ve never noticed it until I read this thread.
I checked the bar of soap that prompted this question. It has a small portion with a layer of white. This leads me to believe that the middle portion is deliberately made different from the rest, perhaps to give structure to the bar.
It would be more expensive to get soap inside of soap i think.
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