I do love it when an experiment confirms something you've thought was the case for a long time but hadn't gotten round to testing logically. I'm getting much closer to being able to suggest where, when and how the first 'real' soap was observed. Now to write a paper about it!

In the latest installment of 'why you should never eat anything in Sally's kitchen without checking whether it will kill you first' aren't these pretty! These are crystallising out of my current experiment. Probably potassium (bi??)carbonate, but I'm not quite sure yet!

New video just gone live over on my YouTube channel! youtu.be/B5KLWPSMot8 (or search for Sally Pointer on YouTube if that's easier!)

Even straight after adding water to ashes the solution is undisputably strongly alkaline. This is because as well as carbon, wood ash contains lots of potassium oxides & hydroxides. Their alkalinity is what makes it a degreaser & when strong enough, an ingredient for soapmaking.

Things are afoot! I've just started off a new batch of woodash lye ready for a major new experiment that will explore one of the possibilities for the earliest discovery of soap. Watch this space for more details over the next few days.

I'm busy making batches of historical recipe soap ready for TORM, the reenactment market in a few weeks. I'm labelling up classic Castile and Soft Soap today, and there will be some Victorian recipe scented soaps getting boiled up this weekend.

A bit of background, I've made soap for years, usually to known historical records. This project is going to try and push what we think we know about its discovery back to its limits, and sort out some of those pesky myths as we go! Expect really exciting risk assessments 😉