I Knew That Soap Had Been Around,

for a few thousand years,

I did not know was that it was not until the American Civil War, that it was used to wash us, and not just clothes, ancient people used these early soaps to clean wool or cotton fibers before weaving them into cloth, rather than for human hygiene. Not even the Greeks and Romans, who pioneered running water and public baths, used soap to clean their bodies. Instead, men and women immersed themselves in water baths and then smeared their bodies with scented olive oils. They used a metal or reed scraper called a strigil to remove any remaining oil or grime, while some people later used soap to clean skin sometimes, it was mainly a laundry product until after the Civil War! Read what history professor Judith Ridner knows about the history of soap at The Conversation, as an aside companies began to develop and market a variety of new products to consumers. In 1879, P&G introduced Ivory soap, one of the first perfumed toilet soaps in the U.S. B.J. Johnson Soap Company of Milwaukee followed with their own palm-and-olive-oil-based Palmolive soap in 1898. It was the world’s best-selling soap by the early 1900s, and what a neat name, until now I never realized that was how that particular brand of soap got it's name! Palmolive ads, like this one from 1900 above, stressed the exotic ingredients in the green bar Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, CC BY.