Everyone is already accustomed to the fact that there is a special soap that is less irritating to the skin and all that. More often, regular solid soap will be terribly alkaline, wash away the protective acid film from the skin, cause dryness, redness and itching.
In the first approximation, solid soap contains alkali, while liquid soap contains much less alkali.
Common bar soaps are made from lye and fat. Some sodium is added to the fatty acids, and soap is obtained. Well, the remaining alkali hangs out there.
Liquid soap is often made not from regular fat, but from synthetic detergents. Therefore, it can be not only neutral, but even sour.
A hundred years ago, liquid soap was called the most caustic mixture with alkali, which was used to wash especially dirty things. Now liquid soap is almost always synthetic, and it is closer to neutral pH than solid bar soap.
Ideally, the pH of the soap should be somewhere around 5.5. The most vicious battery acid has a pH of about 1, and the most vicious alkali has a pH of 14.
It's funny that some of the popular soaps have a pH of anywhere between 10 and 12. That is, they leach the skin up and down. So, when buying any perfumed Camay, be prepared for the fact that its pH goes over the top ten, and the soap will irritate the skin.
Incomprehensible baby soap
In this whole story, I love the incomprehensible effect of Nivea and Johnson's baby baby soap. The first is made on the basis of a synthetic detergent, and the second is natural. But both soaps have a pH of 12. Have you presented?
It would seem that these two baby soaps should make the child itch. But for a completely incomprehensible reason, the itching from them goes away.
Well, that is, the manufacturer, probably a hundred years ago, made a soap that children like by typing. At the same time, they still cannot understand the mechanism of beneficial action.
It is believed that such an alkaline soap somehow cunningly spoils the process of secretion of inflammatory substances in the skin with its brutal alkali. Itching and redness disappears from this. Strange, isn't it? In the past, laundresses used caustic, alkaline soaps and had ulcers. And here baby alkaline soap acts as a medicine. Magic, some kind.
Coolest soap
Do you know which soap irritates the skin the least? We did some research and it turned out to be Dove white.
It has a fairly neutral pH of about 7, but the skin irritation index is about 15 (fifteen) times lower than that of that cool baby soap. This soap is synthetic, and a sea of all sorts of garbage is mixed in it, but the effect is somehow unreal.
It turns out that by subtracting the composition of the soap, you will not recognize its properties. It's a shame, annoying, but... okay.
Have you noticed that one soap is somehow worse than another?
