Soapbox
February 17, 2026 at 11:15PM“There is nothing more delicious than a brand-new bar of soap coming out of the package,” a marketing director for Colgate-Palmolive tells Dan Kois, adding that “we’re passionate about bar” and “bar soap is still in the conversation.” But Kois deserves a little credit for that last remark. In his latest for Slate, Kois sketches a history of personal bathing and charts the rise of liquid body wash against his decades-long affection for bars of Irish Spring, with stops at a bacteria lab and a memorable moment from Friends about soap sharing. As a certain ’90s ad campaign might say, “You’ll like it, too.”
What will I do if my trusty Irish Spring goes the way of 19th-century patent medicines? It seems to be a haunting possibility. So I set out to learn everything I could about bars of soap and the modern body washes threatening to eliminate them. My adventure led me to the 19th-century birth of American cleanliness, to the woman in charge of the Irish Spring account at Colgate-Palmolive, to a particularly evil and destructive episode of Friends, and to a bacteriological laboratory where scientists-for-hire made a stunning discovery about soap I brought from my bathroom. I wanted to know if I was as obsolete as my favorite bath product. What I found is that our prejudices about what we keep in the shower—about what keeps us clean—go far deeper than the skin we scrub.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2026/02/17/bar-soap-irish-spring/
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