While nursing I found that many of my patients had a hard time finding a soap that didn't dry their skin out. With Bar Soap you can add a very large percentage of superfat or excess oil.
With liquid soap, the problem is separation if you attempt this. Your only option is to add other ingredients that alter the performace of the soap. You can't have a clear soap with superfat because the fat causes the soap to cloud. Basically in order to make liquid soap perform like bar soap, you have to add more ingredients.
Often times liquid soap will leave less of a residue in your tub because it doesn't have the excess oil. This excess oil is very benificial. There is never an advantage to using a drying soap. This applies even to those that have oily skin. Often times trying to dry out your skin will only cause your body to work very hard to replace this oil. Much of the time this can cause skin inflammation. If you have oily skin you will have to wash your face more often because your skin is a more favorable enviroment for propionibacterium (the bacteria that causes us to breakout) to propogate. Still it is very important to avoid drying the skin out. If you are using a soap that causes your face to feel tight 15-30 minutes after you wash, your soap may be too drying. The temperature of the water you are washing with can also influence this. Water with an excessively high temperature will severely dry the skin. It is also best to keep the ph low on a face soap. Some body soaps have a higher ph and can dry out the face. If a soap has a low ph, it can be used on the body and the face. I only make soap with a low ph for this reason.
The goal really isn't to remove the oil, it is more to remove the anaerobic bacteria that is stuck to the oil along with dead skin trapped in the folicles. This bacteria lives better under your skin than on top due to a lack of oxygen. You want to make sure your skin can breath. Skin that has clogged folicles will remove oxygen from the folicle opening which can cause the bacteria to thrive better. Skin inflammation can also cause folicles to swell shut. In order to maintain healthy skin, it is less efficient to try to use friction alone to remove oil and bacteria. Too much friction will only inflame the skin. The purpose of soap is to make the removal of oil easier.
Soap is a molecule that attracts water and oil which normally repel each other. Since they are both attracted to soap, it causes the oil on your skin to have a greater affinity to the water. It is always important to ensure after bathing you are not walking away with dry skin. You should always have much less oil on your skin after bathing but the goal is not to leave your skin without any oil.
There are no soaps that are "moisturizing". If a soap is really doing it's job , it should be removing oil from the skin. There are only soaps that are "less drying" than others. This is the purpose of the excess oil that I add to the soap I make.
With liquid soap you often pay for a lot of water being shipped around the world because a very high percentage of liquid soap is water. You also must use much more plastic in order to contain all of this excess water. If bar soap is kept away from moisture and heat it can last a long time. A wooden soap dish with good drainage works very well because the wood often absorbs excess moisuture away from the soap.
The main advantage I see in liquid soap is the use of it in public places. Although the soap I make here at Monarch doesn't have anything in it that would allow harmful microbes to propagate. It is still more sanitary to use a liquid soap in a public place.
Bottom line, I wanted to make a soap that would be best for the skin. based on what I learned as a nurse and the research I continue to do on different ingredients. I figured people could just clean the residue from the tub every couple of weeks in order to save their skin from drying out.
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