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Back in the day Imperial leather was as posh as it got in my house, failing that it was Lux and my nan always bought Camay there was none of this posh French stuff. At Christmas we might receive a box of Bronnley Lemon shaped soap or one of Marks n' sparks's soap in a box usually peach or Iris - lovely!!!
 
When I was a kid we lived very near to a soap factory. At certain times of the day a large cloud of steam would escape from the factory chimney and the whole area smelled wonderful. The factory still works to this day and each soap is handmade, hand polished and packaged by hand. Much of the machinery is the original from when the factory was first opened here in the 1930s, nothing is automated, the soap is mixed by hand and most of the staff have been there for years and have followed their parents into the job. They do a guided tour of the mill and nowadays they still make their original products but they also make soaps for several companies.
I follow their facebook page and they regularly show items from their soap archive and old ledgers, special orders, other old paperwork etc all beautifully written in longhand by fountain pen and ink and they show old soaps they no longer make plus soaps they sent abroad to America, Russia and Germany. They also have a website which tells their history and other facts and I walked past their factory almost everyday as a child I hope they manage to stay there forever because they were and still are a big part of the local community. The Speaker Of the House, Lyndsay Hoyle was born and bred within spitting distance of the factory and he commissioned special soaps for the Houses Of Parliament plus arranged a guided tour for visiting leaders from abroad.
I find soap fascinating because its such a simple, taken for granted product but has played such a big part in lives, from the hard soap sent to soldiers in WW1 to help them combat body lice and fleas, to Florence Nightingale who was the fore runner of hand hygiene in medicine, to the hard blocks my Mother scrubbed my Dad`s shirt collars with, to the baby soap I washed my first baby in nearly 50 years ago, the bars of soap I found hidden in my Mum`s dressing table drawers after she died which she used to make her hankies, underwear and stockings smell nice, the matching soaps and bath cubes I cherished as a young teenager when I was lucky enough to get them for Christmas and the special expensive bar of Chanel no 5 soap I saved for and bought for my wedding day in 1973 and so on.
 
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Vienna said:
When I was a kid we lived very near to a soap factory. At certain times of the day a large cloud of steam would escape from the factory chimney and the whole area smelled wonderful. The factory still works to this day and each soap is handmade, hand polished and packaged by hand. Much of the machinery is the original from when the factory was first opened here in the 1930s, nothing is automated, the soap is mixed by hand and most of the staff have been there for years and have followed their parents into the job. They do a guided tour of the mill and nowadays they still make their original products but they also make soaps for several companies.
I follow their facebook page and they regularly show items from their soap archive and old ledgers, special orders, other old paperwork etc all beautifully written in longhand by fountain pen and ink and they show old soaps they no longer make plus soaps they sent abroad to America, Russia and Germany. They also have a website which tells their history and other facts and I walked past their factory almost everyday as a child I hope they manage to stay there forever because they were and still are a big part of the local community. The Speaker Of the House, Lyndsay Hoyle was born and bred within spitting distance of the factory and he commissioned special soaps for the Houses Of Parliament plus arranged a guided tour for visiting leaders from abroad.
I find soap fascinating because its such a simple, taken for granted product but has played such a big part in lives, from the hard soap sent to soldiers in WW1 to help them combat body lice and fleas, to Florence Nightingale who was the fore runner of hand hygiene in medicine, to the hard blocks my Mother scrubbed my Dad`s shirt collars with, to the baby soap I washed my first baby in nearly 50 years ago, the bars of soap I found hidden in my Mum`s dressing table drawers after she died which she used to make her hankies, underwear and stockings smell nice, the matching soaps and bath cubes I cherished as a young teenager when I was lucky enough to get them for Christmas and the special expensive bar of Chanel no 5 soap I saved for and bought for my wedding day in 1973 and so on.
Click to expand...
What's the name of the factory?
 
Vienna said:
It`s Droyt factory in Chorley Lancashire.

Virtual Factory Tour – Droyt Products

droyt.com droyt.com
Click to expand...
Ahh thank you for posting this - ❤️ wondered if it was Droyt, as I’m from near that area and my mum and dad still live relatively close by…

The soap rubbing thing on QVC drives me spare. And then when they dip their hands into an increasingly murky bowl of lukewarm water to rinse off the ‘miwky siwky lartha’
 
Oh, I remember the days of branded soap that you bought in the supermarkets. Palmolive supposedly kept skin young looking. Imperial Leather appealed to those who aspired to the middle-class lifestyle, and lived in the type of homes you'd see on Tales Of The Unexpected, and Bouquet Of Barbed Wire - in today's world, the type of Q viewers who have at least two homes and can afford to give expensive beauty products as gifts to teachers. Camay, Lux, Pears, Knights Castile, which I think was the lower end of the market, then along came Dove. I remember the soap adverts "...Wow, you can't be her mother...well I am, and I use Palmolive." One of my grandmother's would scoff and say, "A bar of carbolic did us back in the day!".
 
Lilo Lil said:
Through the pandemic I used just Pears Soap to wash hands etc - didn’t buy hand sanitizer type of products etc and am still alive …
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Could never use that alcohol filled liquid. Can you imagine the damage done breaking down the skin with the harsh ingredients? Would make you skin even more prone to all infections through cracking and burning.
 
Dame Fondacox said:
And I've just remembered Shield, which was supposedly a deodorant soap.
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I used to love the smell of that. It's not something I'd have bought for myself as I wasn't a sweaty Betty but one day when me and my schoolfriend were out shopping and there was this bloke asking people into a hall to do market research and the product was Shield, we had to sit through an advert, fill in a questionnaire and everyone was given a bar to take home, so I used to buy it regularly 'cause it smelled so fresh. I seem to remember a lemon version coming out to which I liked.
Nicest smelling soap I've ever had was a bar of Palmolive that I bought in Italy, it smelled completely different to the Palmolive you could buy here, it smelled like a posh perfume. I was kicking myself for only buying one bar!
 
merryone said:
I used to love the smell of that. It's not something I'd have bought for myself as I wasn't a sweaty Betty but one day when me and my schoolfriend were out shopping and there was this bloke asking people into a hall to do market research and the product was Shield, we had to sit through an advert, fill in a questionnaire and everyone was given a bar to take home, so I used to buy it regularly 'cause it smelled so fresh. I seem to remember a lemon version coming out to which I liked.
Nicest smelling soap I've ever had was a bar of Palmolive that I bought in Italy, it smelled completely different to the Palmolive you could buy here, it smelled like a posh perfume. I was kicking myself for only buying one bar!
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I can't speak for all Italians, of course, but in my experience, they demand highly scented bath products. I can't deny that it's nice to walk behind a man or a woman and take in a gentle waft of soap or cologne.
 
The one soap which sticks in my nostrils more than any other is Derbac soap. Does anybody else remember it ? I hated the smell and every Sunday night (bath night) my Mum would wash all 4 kids hair in the stuff ready for returning to school on the Monday. She was paranoid about any of us catching head lice or anything else and would have been mortified to get a brown envelope from the "Nit Nurse" especially as us kids knew anybody taking home a brown envelope had the little buggers.
We lived in an old terraced house with no central heating, just coal fires and in a poor working class part of town. We had a bath on Sunday night and then the rest of the week was top n tail. The hot water came from a back boiler in the coal fire and it produced about 2 inches of hot water in the humungous metal bath.
In fact that was one step up from the tin bath in front of the fire we originally had and which took my Mum ages to fill from pans and kettles of hot water heated on the stove. I shared a bath with my kid brother and when I was a tad older I then shared a bath with my older sister. We felt very posh when we finally got a plumbed in bathroom and were the first in the street to have one. My Mum would have given guided tours of she could have done ha ha !
 
Dame Fondacox said:
And I've just remembered Shield, which was supposedly a deodorant soap.
Click to expand...

Was Shield green?

I remember my Grandma bathing and washing with Fairy Household Soap - the dark green stuff in huge bars - she refused to buy two different sorts of soap, one for washing and one for household chores. If it was good enough to scrub the sink, it was good enough to get rid of her Rimmel Powder and Lipstick... :D
 
merryone said:
Back in the day Imperial leather was as posh as it got in my house, failing that it was Lux and my nan always bought Camay there was none of this posh French stuff. At Christmas we might receive a box of Bronnley Lemon shaped soap or one of Marks n' sparks's soap in a box usually peach or Iris - lovely!!!
Click to expand...
Remember all of those, as a teenager I used to massage Camay into my skin, it was the cold cream! Now @ 76 I have few wrinkles!shall I put it down to Camay?! I do use the L’Occitanne soaps, they last ages so although expensive are quite economical in the long run?
 
WinthropTuesday said:
Was Shield green?

I remember my Grandma bathing and washing with Fairy Household Soap - the dark green stuff in huge bars - she refused to buy two different sorts of soap, one for washing and one for household chores. If it was good enough to scrub the sink, it was good enough to get rid of her Rimmel Powder and Lipstick... :D
Click to expand...
Sheild was green with bluish streaks through it. I think they brought out a few variations as the brand embedded - yellow and maybe pink too.

I too remember the blocks of Fairy that my grandmother used on stains before putting things in her twin-tub washing machine.
 
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