Industry basics and current news. History & Trivia.

Students at the University of Texas voted last week to ban anti-bacterial soap and other products containing triclosan from the university entirely. The bill was authored by five UT students and unanimously approved by the students. Now, of course, it will be up to the university administration (and their purchasing department) to decide if they

Did you know there are huge soap bubble artists? They make AMAZING bubbles – some are 15 feet (yes, FEET) high!

Scientists have discovered gigantic bubble-like structures 25,000 light-years tall ballooning above and below the Milky Way. Within each curved “bubble”, extremely energetic electrons of unknown origin interact with lower-energy light to generate the gamma rays that define these bubbles.


As the World Turns, Proctor and Gamble’s last soap opera is going off the air with it’s last episode (the 13,661st!) to air in September. Their other remaining soap opera, Guiding Light, was canceled in April, 2009. That ends their 76 years in the soap opera business.

I am reading a series of books by S. M. Stirling about what happens when civilization as we know it loses electricity, internal combustion, and gunpowder, as the result of an event the author calls “The Change.” In the years after The Change, the inhabitants of the Willamette Valley in Oregon have learned to cope,

International Clean Hands Week is September 20 – 26, 2009. This is part of a bigger campaign by the Clean Hands Coalition to help people, especially children, understand the importance of handwashing to stay healthy. As Martha would say, “This is a good thing.”

I was looking through my book of Hall’s Journal of Health (1859), and found an interesting article in the August issue of that year. It piqued my interest, so I did a little research. Here’s the article: Best Tooth Wash On one occasion, a correspondent for a water-cure journal inquired if a statement of ours
I’m off to the Handcrafted Soap Makers Guild 2009 Conference in Palm Springs bright and early tomorrow morning! Very excited about it – this will probably be our best conference yet.

Making cold process soap is a combination of art and science. Making swirled soap is particularly tricky. It’s quite a skill to get the colors to swirl in together and still keep them distinct. Every swirled bar is different–not only different from soapmaker to soapmaker, but different from batch to batch and every bar within

In 1952, soap made it into the hit song parade! Johnny Standly had a mega hit song called It’s In The Book. The first part of it is a parody of Little Bo Peep in the form of a Southern Revival sermon, the second part is a song called Grandma’s Lye Soap. Click here to

I don’t follow the news much, so I missed the fact that Marilyn Chambers, star of Behind the Green Door, one of the first “main-stream” porn films, died earlier this month. I only found out when it was briefly mentioned in People magazine. What I found interesting was the note that before Marilyn made her