Remember al-Razi.
The Persian scholar who, in the tenth century, wrote soap-making down in Kitab al-Asrar — the Book of Secrets. He described the process precisely. He just didn’t know it made two things at once.
Nobody did. For 800 years.
In 1779 the Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele boiled olive oil together with lead oxide and found a sweet, syrupy liquid that had separated from the soap. He called it “the sweet principle of fat.” Michel-Eugène Chevreul later gave it the name glycerin — after the Greek word for sweet.
Soap had been making glycerin ever since people started boiling fat with ashes. It took us until 1779 to notice. And less than a hundred years more to start taking it back out.
When soap is saponified — fat meets lye, and the reaction happens — two things arise. Soap and glycerin. The glycerin isn’t a side effect. It isn’t waste. It’s part of the reaction. And it’s the substance that makes traditional soap moisturizing.
Glycerin binds water. It works its way into the upper layer of the skin. It leaves skin in better condition than it found it.
It’s built into soap. It’s there for free. It arises automatically.
Industrial soap production has a continuous process that does one thing neither al-Razi nor Scheele knew about: it removes the glycerin.
The glycerin is sold separately. For cosmetics. For medicine. For explosives. For moisturizer.
You can buy a moisturizer. It contains glycerin. The glycerin was extracted from industrial soap. The soap sitting in your bathroom. The one that dries your skin out.
It’s the same company that produces both products.
It’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s a business model.
Glycerin is literally one of the soap industry’s largest extra revenues. A global market of over three billion dollars a year. And you’re offered the solution to the problem they created, in a separate bottle right next to it.
Two products. Two price tags. One reaction that originally delivered both.
Scheele worked out where the glycerin came from in 1779. We’ve just forgotten it again, because the industry would rather we did.
When a cold-process soap — like the ones we make — contains glycerin, it’s not because we added it. It’s because we didn’t remove it.
That’s the whole difference.
Sources og noter
- al-Razi (854–925) — Kitab al-Asrar (the Book of Secrets), detailed soap-making recipes
- Carl Wilhelm Scheele, 1779 — glycerol isolated as “the sweet principle of fat”; named glycerin by Michel-Eugène Chevreul: Encyclopedia.com, Glycerol
- PubChem — Glycerol — kemisk struktur og dannelse via saponifikation
- Grand View Research — Glycerin Market Size — globalt marked >$3 mia. årligt
- Industriel salt-out proces: glycerin trækkes ud via saltning, sælges som biprodukt
- Wikipedia — Saponification — den kemiske reaktion