Soap is actually a specific substance manufactured by reacting a fat with a strong base. Ancient soap was made by mixing oil or rendered pig fat with lye made by soaking ashes in water.
The “beauty bars” and whatnot you’re seeing are artificial detergents mixed with some sort of gel that gives them a texture similar to soap. (Detergents are chemicals that latch on to dirt/grease with one end of their molecule, and water with the other end, just like soap does, but they’re made in a lab with a different process.) I would bet they aren’t called soap because they don’t meet some legal definition of the word.
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