Handmade Soap Jasmine

Fortunately, plain soap of the noncosmetic, nondrug variety has earned a good reputation. Apart from the familiar sting from getting soap into your eyes or the peril of slipping on a bar in the bathtub or shower, common bath and hand soap is relatively safe. In fact we often use it to remove other substances from our hands and skin that we think are a lot less safe.

For purposes of excluding ordinary soap from regulation as a cosmetic, FDA defines it as a product in which most of the nonvolatile matter consists of an alkali salt of fatty acids and whose detergent properties are due to these alkali-fatty acid compounds. Our ancestors often made their own soap for laundering, cleaning, and bathing from animal fats and wood ashes. Today's soap may contain perfumes, colors, and oils, but if it is represented only as soap it's out of FDA's regulatory bailiwick.

Ordinary soap is regulated by the Consumer Product Safety Commission under authority of the Hazardous Substances Act. CPSC's jurisdiction covers most noncosmetic, nondrug substances used in the home.

If the bar you use for bathing does not claim to be a soap, it's probably a synthetic detergent product. FDA defines a cosmetic as an article intended to be used on the body for cleansing, beautifying, promoting attractiveness, or altering the appearance; thus, a nonsoap product intended for any of these purposes is automatically classified as a cosmetic.

Soaps and synthetic detergent cleansing agents function in water in somewhat the same way; that is, they break down the resistance barrier between the water and the dirt, grime, oil, or other material, allowing it to be wetted and washed away. Soap works well in soft water, but in hard water, which contains a relatively high amount of calcium in solution, the calcium and soap react to form a gummy material called soap scum, which includes dirt and other matter. This gummy stuff is what forms the familiar ring in the bathtub.