It’s supposedly the same soap through and through, all the way to the core of the bar, right? Why does it react so differently to water and being rubbed on skin when it is reduced to a sliver?
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Explain this …. I now use artisanal soap (handmade soap) it’s suds and lathers right to the very last slither. Love the stuff 🫧
So…. dry your soap after use???
Soap maker here: the surface thing explained above is part of the answer but that’s not the main reason.
You are probably talking about commercial (industrial) soap. To reduce the cost of production, an industrial bar of soap mimic the behavior of natural soap using chemicals. For example, they remove glycerine, a natural moisturizer resulting naturally in the saponification reaction to sell it separately. They replace it with cheap chemical moisturizing agents. To keep the whole thing looking like soap (😂) they add more chemicals, preservatives… Each chemical has a role to look like that old fashion natural soap bar. So when it becomes older, its chemical composition becomes a little unbalanced. Why less lather? probably because sulfactants used to artificially create lather are less concentrated. By contrast, a soap molecule, the natural one, the one you can make at home with some oils and some lye, is uniform and stable, it’s one molecule and its behavior won’t change.
Next time you buy a bar of soap from the supermarket, before throwing the package, google that Exxx stuff in the components list 😉
Because there’s not as much soap…?
I had the exact same frustration but then I switched to Kirk’s Castile soap. In my moderately hard water it will lather nearly as well when it’s a sliver as it did right out of the wrapper
I assumed soap had to have some kind of useless core, until I moved from the US to France, and was amazed to have suds to the end.
Depression era trick I learned from my grandmother was to unwrap all the bars of soap when you bought them. 1) they could send in the wrappers to get towels and such, 2) when the bars dry out they last longer.
So should we be throwing it away when it doesn’t lather?
It might have something to do with the filler used in soaps being lighter than soap molecules,causing it to rise to the top as the soap sets and hardens. I have always found that as soap bar is used more and more, its cleaning ability increases and foaming ability decreases.
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