Soap snot to-go

Does anyone remember the pink soap that they had in the school bathrooms when we were growing up? If you went to school after the 80s, you might not have experienced this all. The soap was a dry pink powder that came in a dispenser that looked just like this. Our favorite thing to do was to get a big handful and, using a little water, shape it into soap creatures and miniature soap sculptures. They never held together very well, but it was still really fun.

I’m not sure that the pink soap from school has a whole lot to do with today’s post, but I was definitely thinking about it the past few months.

I’ve discovered in the last few years that I’m allergic to basically everything. It’s evolved over the years, but there are a lot of things that can cause my skin to break out in rashes if I’m not careful. The most inconvenient of these is liquid soap. All different kinds of liquid soaps. I have never tended to use these kinds of soaps a lot at home. But there have been occasions where I’ve had to use soap from a hotel room for example, or a hospital room, and over more than about two days of exposure, my hands just become raw red gloves. The more often this has happened, the more rapidly and severely I react. It’s likely some kind of preservative or else some of the common scents used, but I haven’t been able to identify a common theme or figure out which might be safe.

This has made it imperative that I replace all of the soap in my house with bar soap. It also means I have to travel with bar soap whenever we’re away from home. But sometimes when you’re out and about in public, you don’t necessarily have a big soap case with bar soap in it just tucked into your purse.

This situation has left me with two distinct issues. First, I need a convenient way to have soap with me that I don’t react to. Second, what to do with all the little slivers of bar soap that I’ve been accumulating in my soap dishes since I switched over completely to bar soap? To solve the first problem, I initially contemplated just getting some container that I could carry that pink powder soap around in. But then my mom gave me some soap leaves that were so convenient and useful that I figured I would just start to use those when traveling.

To solve the second problem, one day I was looking at the slivers of soap, and I thought I could just dissolve them completely in water. That would make liquid soap right? No. Friends, it made snot. Soap snot. So I guess that makes it clean? But it was still snotty. And it was not suitable for dispensing from a liquid soap container.

Then I had a brilliant idea. What if I spread the soap snot onto something absorbent, like paper towels? Theoretically, the liquid would eventually evaporate, leaving the plain Castile soap behind on the paper medium.

This weekend I tried it, and I was frankly both surprised and thrilled with the success of my experiment.

First, I took the soap snot and added both a couple of additional soap slivers that I found, and some hot water. I let it sit for a few hours while I was doing other things, and when I returned to it, I used my fingers to break up the pieces of soap that had continued to soften in the water.

This left me with even more (and more concentrated) soap snot.

Then I laid some plain paper towels down onto a jelly roll pan and poured the soap snot over it until it was well soaked. The first time I did this, I lined the pan with a silicone baking liner. But it wasn’t really necessary so I skipped it the second time

I let these dry for a few hours to let the soap concentrate, and then lifted them onto a drying rack to dry completely.

When they were completely dry, I was able to easily cut them into pieces. I just kind of guessed at how big. To be honest, the paper didn’t feel very soapy, so I wasn’t sure I was going to work. But it really did.

Now, the soap leaves that I have bought dissolved into nothing under running water and with a bit of scrubbing in between your hands. These, of course, don’t. Because paper towels don’t dissolve. But the pieces aren’t very big. After using them to wash my hands, the piece of paper towel remaining was about the size of a pea. Not something you would want to go down the sink but easy enough to just throw away when you’re done rinsing. I guess I’ll see how annoying it gets after I’ve used these for a while.

I think next time, I might try pouring the soap snot directly onto the silicone pan liner and just letting it congeal over the course of a few days. Maybe that way it could be sliced with a knife and used as soap sheets that don’t require any paper substrate. Maybe you could even cut out little shapes. If you have very tiny cookie cutters, which I don’t. But I bet that they could be procured.

That’s it for today I hope you enjoyed it and can find some useful ideas for using up your own soap snot.