How I cut the number of soaps I use in half

Why do I have 10 different kinds of soap in my house?

Your House is Your Machine explores a systems-driven approach to home organization and life. If you like what you’re reading, perhaps you can share this with your best friend, your mom, or someone you know who dreams of an organized home.

Sometimes when solving a problem, the trick is to simplify the problem rather than design the perfect solution.

My soap saga is an excellent example of this. Soap can quickly get complicated. Marketers tell us we need a lot of specialized soaps in our homes: For each job, the perfectly customized soap! Following their lead, here’s where I found myself a few years go:

• Dish soap

• DishWASHER soap

• Laundry detergent

• Shampoo

• Body soap

• Bath soap

• Hand soap

• Face wash

• Baby soap

• Baby shampoo

That’s a lot of soaps! And if you have each of these 10 soaps, you need to devote space in your brain to knowing when one type is low, refilling the soaps, researching to make sure that scary chemical X you just read about isn’t in each soap, and so on.

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My soap-simplification journey began when I was thinking about starting a family and learned about all the compounds in personal care products that can mess up your fertility. I quickly became overwhelmed at the prospect of having to research and replace all these different products with hormone-safe ones.

Then it occurred to me…do I really need TEN different types of soaps? Isn’t soap basically just….soap…at the end of the day? Who will get mad if I use shampoo on my body? What law says I can’t use the same stuff for dishes and my hands?

Call it laziness, call it discernment…either way I’ve managed to cut down on products by asking soaps to do multiple jobs: