We live in the soap commercial

For people as dirty as we think we are, we go through no small amount of the foamy stuff, and the latent chemist in me was curious enough to take a plunge into soapmaking.  I mean, if you screw it up, it can explode in a glorious toxic flume!  You can inhale lye and poison yourself!  Or the little squirrel (now fully 2-and-a-half-where-has-time-gone?!).  And even if you do manage to successfully get your ingredients in the pot and have it everything go right, you can still not let the lye saponify just so, and burn the everloving shit out of your skin when using the stuff!  Very exciting, and very exclamatory.  !

I made several batches, way more than even we’re capable of using, and varying the recipe each time.  The secret, for us, is a hard bar, and with a good abrasive.  I tried coffee grounds (new and used), corn meal, the crushed bones of fairies, and hand-cut oatmeal.  Here’s what I’ve learned so far:

• Coffee Grounds, New:  Leaves coffee all over the place.
• Coffee Grounds, Used, Nice abrasive, but leaves trails of coffee tears all over the place.  Cleans you, makes a mess of everything else.
• Corn Meal:  Cleans you, but leaves you smelling of fish fry.
• Coffee Grounds, Used + Corn Meal:  Fish fry.  For breakfast.
• Crushed Bones of Fairies:   Good for micro-dermabrasion, but not environmentally sustainable.
• Hand-cut oatmeal:  Yes. Cut them not too finely with mortar and pestle and it’ll rip every last layer of dead skin, every last bit of smegma, and if you’re Ethan Hawke and it’s eighteen years ago, you can easily remove your outer layers of every last relic of genetic material and safely assume Jude Law’s identity.

I will be experimenting much, much more this year, with any luck.  Stay tuned for recipes of such concoctions as Jude Law’s Smegma and Ethan Hawke’s Morning After Uma.