Most mornings follow the same quiet routine: soap in the shower, deodorant, toothpaste, a rinse of mouthwash, and shampoo on the days you wash your hair. We reach for familiar personal hygiene products without a second thought. But have you ever stopped to consider what's in those products, or why they are there at all?
Each one on the shelf has a story. Some are thousands of years old. Others are barely a century old, and a few of the worries they promise to fix were invented by the people selling them. Meanwhile your skin, your scalp and your mouth do a good share of the cleaning on their own.
Knowing which is which makes the shelf shorter, and switching to natural hygiene products easier. It also makes one more thing clear: "natural" on a label tells you where something came from, not how gently it will treat you.
Soap: fat and ash
Soap is one of the oldest things we make. Soap-like materials were being made in Babylon around 2800 BC, and the recipe has barely changed since: fat, plus an alkali that was once taken from the ashes of burnt plants.
Not everyone used it. The Romans did not use soap until at least the first century AD. Instead, they massaged oil into the skin and scraped it off again, dirt and all, with a strigil, a curved metal blade with a handle. Pliny the Elder, writing in that century, called soap "an invention of the Gauls". An empire that built aqueducts still scraped itself clean with a blade.
For most of that history, the fat was tallow, rendered animal fat. Even the word may carry it. The Latin for soap, sapo, was probably borrowed from an early Germanic language, and it shares a root with sebum, the Latin for tallow. Tallow soap is still made, and on an ingredient list it appears as sodium tallowate. An made from grass-fed tallow is about as close to the old recipe as you can buy. Soap made from olive oil, known as Castile soap, has a long reputation for mildness.
A natural soap is fat and alkali, and not much else. Look for a bar with a short ingredient list, with olive oil, tallow or shea butter near the top and no "fragrance". Plain soap is still alkaline, though, and that matters more than the label lets on.
Your skin's own acid
Healthy skin is slightly acidic. A thin film covers it, made from sweat, the skin's own oil and a few other compounds, and it helps keep germs out.
How acidic? In one study, 330 people went a day without a shower or any skin products, and the skin on their forearms settled at a pH just under 5. The researchers put its natural level at about 4.7. Soap pushes that number up, and so does plain tap water, which in Europe is usually around pH 8. After a wash, skin took up to six hours to return to its natural level.
It matters, because skin with a pH below 5 was in better shape, with a stronger barrier, more moisture and less flaking. The acid also keeps the friendly bacteria that live on your skin attached, while an alkaline surface loosens their hold. Your skin has kept house for its own bacteria all your life, and it does not need much help.
You do not have to stop washing. Good Hygiene: The Everyday Habits That Matter Most has how much soap your skin needs, why a shorter, warm shower does it less harm, and the one place soap earns its keep every time: your hands, after the toilet, before you eat or cook, after handling raw meat and when you come home. After a shower, a little shea butter, olive oil or tallow balm on still-damp skin locks the moisture in.
For rough elbows and heels, a spoonful of sugar or fine salt stirred into a little oil makes a gentle scrub. And for nails, a nail brush under running water does more than any product, with a drop of almond or jojoba oil to keep the cuticles from cracking.
A worry for sale
Deodorant is younger than you might think. The first, Mum, was trademarked in 1888, and the first antiperspirant, Everdry, arrived in 1903. Neither sold easily. Sweat was not something polite people talked about.
In the early 1910s a Cincinnati schoolgirl named Edna Murphey began selling an antiperspirant her father had made to keep his hands dry while he worked. She called it Odorono. Sales were slow, and in 1919 her advertising agency's copywriter, James Young, tried something new. His advertisement in the Ladies' Home Journal was headed "Within the Curve of a Woman's Arm". Its message was that a woman could smell without knowing it, and that no one would tell her, though they would talk about it behind her back.
Some 200 readers were so offended that they cancelled their subscriptions. Sales rose by 112% the following year. The fear worked better than the product ever had. Odorono sold dryness. Young sold doubt.
It outlived the advert, too. In 1967 The Who put a song called "Odorono" on their album The Who Sell Out, a mock advert in which a singer's body odour spoils her big night.
Odorono left one more mark. The company coined "B.O." in 1919, and Lifebuoy soap made it famous. In the 1930s a Lifebuoy sign at the Philadelphia Phillies' baseball ground announced, "The Phillies use Lifebuoy". One night in 1935, someone added, "And they still stink".
The armpit
The smell is not the sweat itself. Most of your sweat is watery and has no smell at all. The glands in the armpits make a heavier, oilier sweat, and the smell comes when bacteria on the skin feed on it.
How much of it you make is partly written in your genes. A single gene, ABCC11, decides whether your earwax is wet or dry, and whether your underarms smell much at all. A version of it that does not work is common in East Asia, and the people who carry it tend to have dry earwax and little underarm odour. If you carry it, you were born with deodorant built in.
What you put on changes the bacteria too. When people who usually wore deodorant or antiperspirant stopped for a few days, the bacteria in their armpits shifted, and the new mix was not the same as the one found on people who never used any product. Your armpit is a small ecosystem, and every product resets it.
If you want to go natural, deodorants made with baking soda and arrowroot powder neutralise odour and absorb moisture. For sensitive skin, there are versions without the baking soda, such as an made with arrowroot, coconut oil and shea butter. Good Hygiene, linked above, has what the worry about aluminium in antiperspirants turned out to be.
Toothpaste
Cleaning teeth with a powder is ancient. From about 5000 BC, the Egyptians made one from the ash of burnt ox hooves, pumice, burnt eggshells and myrrh. The Greeks and then the Romans added crushed bones and oyster shells. Toothpaste in a jar came much later: Colgate began making it in 1873.
The brush has its own story. Before it came the chew stick, a twig with a frayed end, and the earliest have been found in Sumer, from around 3500 BC. The toothbrush as Britain came to know it began in a prison cell. In 1770 William Addis was jailed for causing a riot, and decided that rubbing his teeth with a rag, soot and salt could be improved on. He saved a small bone from a meal, drilled holes in it and tied in tufts of bristle. From 1780 he was making toothbrushes in large numbers. Few riots have done more for the nation's teeth.
Toothpaste had its salesmen too. The advertising man Claude Hopkins built Pepsodent's adverts around the yellow film on your teeth, and the promise to remove it. Its much-advertised ingredient, "Irium", turned out to be another name for sodium lauryl sulfate, a detergent.
Charcoal is not new either. An 1866 home encyclopedia recommended powdered charcoal for the teeth, and warned that many of the tooth powders on sale did more harm than good. The same warning fits the charcoal toothpastes sold today. A review of the evidence found too little to back up either their safety or their claims, and a few studies reported worn enamel and more decay. Charcoal is a scrub, and enamel does not grow back.
A toothpaste made from simple ingredients, such as baking soda, coconut oil and peppermint oil, cleans and freshens without the extras. For protection against decay, Good Hygiene has the two options with the best records: fluoride, or hydroxyapatite, the mineral that tooth enamel is built from.
Mouthwash
Listerine was created in 1879 by a chemist in St. Louis and named after Joseph Lister, the pioneer of antiseptic methods in the operating theatre. It began as a surgical antiseptic, and it was later sold as a floor cleaner and as a cure for gonorrhoea. It only took off in the 1920s, when its makers began advertising it against "chronic halitosis", then an obscure medical term for bad breath. Their ads showed lonely young women and men who longed to marry, and were put off by a sweetheart's bad breath.
As the advertising historian James Twitchell put it, "Listerine did not make mouthwash as much as it made halitosis." In seven years, the company's revenue rose from $115,000 to more than $8 million. Bad breath was as old as mouths. The panic about it was brand new.
A strong rinse is rarely the answer, though. Good Hygiene has why: the back of the tongue is where it usually starts, and strong antiseptic mouthwash can even raise your blood pressure. 12 Signs Your Body Is Trying to Tell You Something Important has what bad breath that brushing does not fix can point to.
One homemade rinse to avoid is water with a few drops of tea tree oil. Tea tree oil is poisonous by mouth, and a rinse is easily swallowed. A glass of warm salt water, or a sprig of fresh mint or parsley after a meal, is a gentler way to freshen up.
Shampoo
Shampoo began as a massage. The word comes from the Hindi cā̃pō, from a root meaning to press, knead or soothe, and it named a traditional Indian head massage with oil. The original shampoo was the part we now rush. Dean Mahomed, an Indian traveller and entrepreneur, brought "shampooing" to Britain. In 1814 he and his Irish wife, Jane Daly, were running shampooing baths, and in 1821 they opened a shampooing vapour bath in Brighton.
The liquid in the bottle came later. Liquid shampoo was improved for mass production in 1927 by Hans Schwarzkopf in Berlin, and at first, soap and shampoo were much the same thing.
Then there is the line on the back of the bottle: lather, rinse, repeat. With modern shampoo, the first wash is normally enough. The second makes more lather, which looks like more cleaning, and the result is twice as much shampoo bought as you need.
Your scalp makes its own oil, sebum, which keeps hair soft and protected. Strong shampoos can strip your hair of its natural oils. The older idea still works: wash less often, and spend a minute massaging your scalp with your fingertips when you do. A shampoo with fewer ingredients and no added fragrance is kinder to a scalp that itches or flakes.
"Natural" is not the same as gentle
Natural ingredients are chemicals as well, and some of them are strong ones. Nettles are natural too, and they still sting.
Tea tree oil is the clearest example. It kills germs and fungi, which is why it turns up in so many natural products. It is also poisonous by mouth and unsafe for children. Essential Oils, linked below, has why it causes more skin allergies than any other essential oil, and why an old, opened bottle is worse than a fresh one.
Fragrance is the other word to watch, plant-based or not. On a label, it is one word standing in for a mix the label does not spell out. How to Shield Yourself from Everyday Environmental Toxins, linked below, has what happened when teenage girls swapped their usual products for simpler ones for just three days.
So read a natural label the way you would read any other. Short is good. Oils you recognise are good. A long list of essential oils is a long list of things your skin might react to.
Body powder
Body powder helps absorb moisture, and for most of the last century it meant talc. Talc is a soft mineral, and part of the problem is what it can be mined alongside. Talc containing asbestos is a known cause of cancer. Talc without asbestos is now classed as a probable cause of cancer as well, though the studies disagree.
In 2018 a news investigation reported that Johnson & Johnson had known for decades that there was asbestos in its baby powder. In 2020 the company stopped selling its talc baby powder in the United States and Canada, and in 2022 it announced it would switch to cornstarch, while maintaining that its talc was safe.
The swap is easy. A bag of from the baking aisle, or plain cornstarch, does the same job. Look for powders made with them, with kaolin clay if you like, and no talc on the label. The kitchen cupboard had the answer all along.
The tips, in short
Soap. A plain bar with a short ingredient list, used where sweat gathers, and water for the rest.
Skin. Moisturise while it is still damp, with shea butter, olive oil or tallow balm.
Deodorant. Baking soda and arrowroot, or a version without the baking soda for sensitive skin, and nothing scented.
Toothpaste. Leave the charcoal on the shelf, and choose fluoride or hydroxyapatite for protection against decay.
Mouthwash. Usually none. Clean the back of the tongue instead, and never rinse with tea tree oil.
Shampoo. Less often, with a minute of scalp massage each time.
Powder. Arrowroot or cornstarch, not talc.
One product at a time
None of this means emptying the bathroom cabinet. Your skin, scalp and mouth already do much of the work, and the products are there to help them, not to take over. And "natural" on a label is a reason to start reading, not to stop. A label-scanning app such as Yuka can tell you what is in the ones you already own.
Sun cream follows the same rule. Shade and a hat do most of the work, with sunscreen for the days you will be out for long. Key Factors That Speed Up Aging (And How to Slow Them Down) has why, and why some sun is still how your skin makes vitamin D.
Start with one product at a time. This week, swap your soap for a plain bar with a short ingredient list, and use it only where you need it.
Skin that reacts to everything? Essential Oils: What They Can Do and How to Use Them Safely — what is in the bottle, what the evidence supports, where the claims go too far, and how to use them safely.
Wondering what your products leave behind? How to Shield Yourself from Everyday Environmental Toxins — which chemicals leave the body fast and which stay, what comes with the food, what goes on the skin, and the receipt at the till.
Know someone whose bathroom shelf is overflowing? Send them this, and tell them to start with the soap.
Disclaimer: This article is general information. For advice about your own health, talk to a qualified health professional.
Affiliate Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, All For Life earns from qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you. We only link to products we would recommend without the commission.
Sources
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