No one really knows where it came from… That said, the first ever handmade soap seems to have been found in clay cylinders around 2800 BCE in modern day Iraq. Originally (and often to this very day!) soap was made with a combination of animal fat and/or vegetable fat and ash, or an alkaline salt product. Archaeologists have found a soap recipe on a Mesopotamian clay tablet from 2200 BCE.
Interestingly enough, soap wasn’t even first used to get that squeaky clean just out of the shower feeling, but to do the after dinner wash up. To get that pesky bacon grease out of the pan, basically.
Soap making guilds started popping up as early as the 7th Century.
By the 8th century, there were soap factories in Italy and Spain that were capitalizing on their close proximity to olive groves. Olive oil became the primary ingredient to their soap.
During the height of the industrial revolution, Eugene-Michel Chevreul from England determined the perfect quantity of animal fat to be in soap. Thus began soap making on a commercial level, marking the end of homemade soap. People began buying soap from catalogs in stores.
And the rest is history…
Irina Marchenkova, President, CHIC Luxury Soaps.
www.chicsoaps.com
No comments:
Post a Comment