Daily dose of bad design: The bar soap

Rohil Nair
UX Collective
Published in
6 min readJul 20, 2020
Person lathering soap on hands
Image courtesy: Pexels

The singular most unaffected industry during this pandemic, apart from Healthcare, is the soap industry. The importance of its use is being repeatedly said across all mainstream media as the most effective means to curb the spread of this deadly virus, and it is true. While they don’t necessarily mean the bar soap as such, it is one of the major methods of consumption of this quintessential product of everyday life. As an important product, especially in its times of growing popularity, it is high time we talked about its design.

We’ve all used it in our lives- to bathe, to wash clothes, to disinfect and for endless cleansing processes. Even if you’re a liquid soap person, you’ve used bar soap at least once in your life or you’re an edge case. But what if I told you, that the bar soap is single-handedly, the greatest example of bad design that we put up with on a daily basis? Let’s see why.

How to work it properly

Person washing hands with soap
Image courtesy: Pexels

Before we get into the antics of the bar soap, let’s see how it actually works. Bar soap contains compounds called surfactants that physically remove germs and debris from the skin. According to the article by SELF and many more on dermatology, the most recommended way to use a bar soap is by directly scrubbing and lathering it on the skin, instead of using a loofah or a washcloth.

That being said, the design of the bar soap is flawed because of a multitude of reasons. Let’s look at them one by one.

The form

Person hoalding a soap cake
Image courtesy: Pexels

According to history, soap cakes have been around in this world for over 2500 years now, first recorded in history at Babylonia. All the while, as we have progressed in soap making in terms of its efficiency and effectiveness, its form has more or less stayed unchanged; it has always been a cuboidal block.

Pink soap cake on a light pink surface
Image courtesy: Unsplash

As manufacturers commercialized and started advertising their own counterparts, soaps have changed in shape with the advancements in moulding and cutting equipment in mass production. Now, iconic brands have their own iconic shapes. Nevertheless, it is basically a shaped up cuboid with rounded edges.

Ergonomically speaking, most bar soaps provide little to no grip at all.

As you are supposed to, if one is to rub it against one’s body in the shower, the soap is most likely to slip from your hand with all the lather. If you don’t experience this, you have been trained over time to overcome this difficulty in your little ways, but ergonomically speaking, most bar soaps provide little to no grip at all.

What happens when a bar soap gets smaller beyond a point? You cannot grip it anymore and you throw it away. Essentially, you never use the full bar soap which you pay for.

The storage

With some quick research, one can easily find out that the most healthy solution to store a soap bar is to store it in a dry place. Ideally, chemically inert materials like stone are used for soap dishes and an adequate amount of drains are provided for the soap to dry. But then again, we come across issues.

The most prevalent and popular way to store a bar of soap is to use a plastic/steel soap dish. Most of these dishes provide little to no ventilation and very less drainage for a soap to dry up. And more often than not, these drains get clogged up by soap over time, if they aren’t cleaned regularly.

Even if it is stored properly, experts recommend that you wash your bar for at least 15 seconds to cleanse the surfaces before and after a bath.

The portability

The portability of bar soap is a major cause of concern. It is so difficult to travel with a used bar soap that people just buy new bars every time they go places. This can be very good for the stakeholders as this puts out more units in sale, but as a product, the bar soap fails to meet this requirement.

The process

This brings us to the step-by-step process of using a soap bar with the most hygienic practices recommended by experts.

  1. Wash the soap before you take a bath for 15 seconds
  2. Take a bath, scrubbing your body with the soap bar in direct contact
  3. Wash the soap again for 15 seconds
  4. Store it dry in a well ventilated, inert soap dish
  5. Wash the soap dish frequently

A long, fulfilling shower being as satisfying as it is, as functioning individuals, most people want to get their daily routine done, as efficient and fast as possible, with the minimal number of frills attached and the bar soap comes with too many of them, out of the box.

The design

Designers around the world are struggling to give the world better and faster solutions, on a daily basis. At the end of the day, the goal of good design is to make human lives as easy and efficient as possible. To this date, the journey we once embarked on to live a tad better than yesterday has continued without ever stopping. In this journey, the bar soap is one of the very few aspects of life that we’ve probably left out on.

At the end of the day, the goal of good design is to make human lives as easy and efficient as possible.

Yes, we have come up with more efficient and less cumbersome alternatives like liquid soap and body washes and even body,face and hair soaps; but the fact that the bar soap is still a strong contender shows its efficiency in the mere task that it is supposed to do. The dermatological safety and environmental friendliness of other alternatives still remain a question.

The solution

The bar soap being one of the most efficient means of cleansing the human body cannot be completely extradited from the market. Instead, we need strong solutions to the blatant design flaws that it possesses. The ergonomics, the storage, the portability and the usability are all major areas of improvement for the bar soap, as a product.

Over the years, we’ve learned to embrace these flaws and come up with workarounds and shape our interactions around these flaws. But that, as far as good design is concerned, is counter-productive.

What we need are more brains working on something as fundamental and quintessential as a bar of soap, and more people to give a damn about it. We need an all-rounder product that fixes all these problems, while providing an eco-friendly, sustainable and feasible solution.

The UX Collective donates US$1 for each article published in our platform. This story contributed to Bay Area Black Designers: a professional development community for Black people who are digital designers and researchers in the San Francisco Bay Area. By joining together in community, members share inspiration, connection, peer mentorship, professional development, resources, feedback, support, and resilience. Silence against systemic racism is not an option. Build the design community you believe in.

Sign up to discover human stories that deepen your understanding of the world.

Published in UX Collective

We believe designers are thinkers as much as they are makers. Curated stories on UX, Visual & Product Design. https://linktr.ee/uxc

No responses yet

What are your thoughts?