The Soap Our Grandparents Used (And Why They Had Better Skin)

Look at a photograph of your grandmother at thirty. Look at the skin. Now look in the mirror, and look at yours. There is a comparison most of us have made, quietly, and tried not to think about. The standard explanation is sun damage, or stress, or modern diet, or social media giving us too many comparisons. The explanation that almost nobody offers is the one that, on the evidence, probably accounts for a lot of it: she washed with a different bar of soap.

Until roughly the 1970s, the bathroom of an average household contained one bar of soap. It did the entire job — hands at the basin, face in the morning, body in the shower, hair when it needed washing, shave in front of the mirror. The bar was a real, saponified, three-or-four-ingredient soap: olive oil, tallow, lye, sometimes a little glycerin, sometimes a botanical for scent. The recipe was old and it was finished. (For a longer look at why that small ingredient list is its own argument, see our note on why simple soap works.)

What happened next was a marketing decision dressed up as personal care. The cosmetic industry, looking for growth, fragmented the single bar of soap into a dozen specialised products. Shampoo for the hair (so the bar could not also wash hair). Conditioner for the ends (so the shampoo could afford to strip the strands). Body wash for the torso (in a bottle, with preservatives, with fragrance, with sulfates for visible foam). Face wash for the face (with a different surfactant blend, often gentler — which by itself tells you that the body wash was not). Hand soap for the hands. Shaving foam for the shave.

Each new product justified itself by promising to do something the single bar could not. In almost every case, the single bar had been doing the job perfectly well — sometimes for several thousand years. What the new products actually delivered was a longer ingredient list, a higher monthly spend, more plastic in the bathroom, and a daily exposure profile that included parabens, sulfates, phthalates, and synthetic fragrances at concentrations no human skin had ever had to negotiate before.

The skin our grandparents had at thirty was not a genetic miracle. It was a skin that had been washed, for thirty years, with three ingredients. That was the whole secret. There was no eight-step routine, no double cleanse, no actives, no acids, no serums. There was a bar of soap on a slatted wooden dish, and there was a clean cotton towel on a hook beside it.

We are not, to be clear, suggesting that everybody throw out their skincare. There are excellent modern products that do things old bars cannot — sunscreens, retinoids, specific medical creams. What we are suggesting is that the base of the routine — the thing your skin is exposed to twice a day, every day, for the rest of your life — should probably be the boring old bar, not the bottled body wash that was invented in 1972 to sell more bottles.

Our Aleppo bar is, in every meaningful sense, the bar your grandmother's grandmother used. Three ingredients. Two years of curing. One job, done well. The skin she had at thirty is available again, if you are willing to put the bottle down.

— Filed from the workshop