What Soap Flakes Actually Are, And Eight Things To Do With Them

Soap flakes are soap that has been shredded. That is the entire definition. If you were hoping for more, we are sorry.

A bar of soap is a solid, and solids dissolve slowly. That is fine when you are holding one under a running tap and a nuisance when you want it gone in thirty seconds in a bowl of warm water. Shred the bar and you multiply its surface area many times over. It dissolves almost at once. Nothing else about it has changed. Same soap, more edges.

We shred ours from the same cold process bars we sell as bars — the uneven ends of the loaf, mostly, which is a better fate for them than the bin. There is no separate flake recipe. There is a grater.

What are soap flakes used for?

Eight things, in roughly the order we reach for them. None of these are novel. Your great-grandmother would find this list obvious and slightly patronising.

• Hand-washing wool and silk. The thing flakes are genuinely best at. Dissolve them first, let the water cool to lukewarm, then put the garment in. Wool felts when it meets heat and agitation, not when it meets soap.
• Delicates generally. Bras, anything with elastane, anything you paid too much for.
• Machine laundry. Works, with conditions. Those conditions are a whole entry of their own — doses, water hardness and the machines that hate them.
• Floors. Sealed wood and stone. A tablespoon in a bucket. It leaves no film because there is no polymer in it to leave one.
• Washing the dog. Ours has opinions about this and we do it anyway.
• Soaking a stain before it becomes a stain. A paste of flakes and a little warm water, worked in, left twenty minutes.
• Brushes and combs. Paint brushes, hairbrushes, anything with bristles that traps grease.
• Travel. A paper twist of flakes weighs nothing, cannot leak, and is not a liquid, which airports care about more than you do.

The ninth thing people ask about is dishes. Flakes will wash a plate. They will not cut through a roasting tin, because olive oil soap is not especially good at oil — which is a genuinely funny thing for a soap made of olive oil to be bad at, and we will come back to it.

Can you still buy pure soap flakes?

Yes, but fewer than there used to be, and this is the question people are really asking. The large British and French brands that sold flakes for most of the twentieth century mostly stopped, because detergent arrived and detergent is cheaper to make, easier to ship as a liquid, and far easier to advertise. A box of shredded soap does not photograph like innovation.

What replaced them on most shelves is not soap. It is detergent in flake or powder form, which behaves differently in water, is made from different feedstock, and is labelled with a great deal of confidence about being gentle. Read the ingredients. If you see the word sodium olivate, or sodium cocoate, or any sodium -ate of a named oil, that is saponified oil and it is soap. If you see surfactants named with numbers and hyphens, it is detergent. Neither is a scandal. They are just not the same product.

What are soap flakes made of?

Ours are made of olive oil, water and lye, and then time. Three ingredients go in, and by the time it reaches you the lye is gone — consumed by the reaction that made the soap in the first place. There is nothing else in it. No enzymes, no optical brighteners, no fragrance in the unscented sacks, no polymer to make fabric feel soft by coating it.

That last one is worth a sentence. A lot of what people describe as softness in modern laundry is a thin film of conditioning polymer deposited on the fibre. Soap does not do that. Fabric washed in soap feels like fabric. Some people find that a revelation and some people find it disappointing, and both reactions are correct.

How do you dissolve soap flakes properly?

Hot water first, garment second. This is the only technique in the whole subject and most people get it wrong on the first attempt.

Put the flakes in a jug, add water hot enough that you would not keep your hand in it, and stir until the water goes cloudy and slightly slippery and there is nothing granular left at the bottom. Then add that to your basin or your machine drawer, and bring the temperature down to whatever the garment actually wants. If you drop dry flakes onto wool in cool water you will get undissolved specks stuck in the fibres, and you will conclude that flakes do not work. They work. The order was wrong.

Are soap flakes better than detergent?

Sometimes, and we have written a whole entry arguing both sides of it honestly, including the cases where detergent plainly wins. The short version: soap is better on protein fibres and better for anyone who would rather not own a plastic bottle, and detergent is better on oil, better in hard water, and better in a machine built after about 2015 that has opinions about suds.

We sell the flakes. We are aware of how that sentence reads next to this one. It is still true.

What to look for when you buy them

• A named oil."Vegetable oil" is a category, not an ingredient. Olive, coconut and palm behave completely differently in water.
• Saponified, not surfactant. See above. Read the list.
• No optical brightener. It is a dye that makes white fabric reflect blue so your eye reads it as cleaner. It is not cleaning anything.
• Paper, not plastic. Flakes have no reason to be in a bottle. If they are in a bottle, ask why.

Everything we make — bars, flakes, the offcuts, the shampoo — comes off the same racks in the same room and is listed, without photography or scrolling, on the range.