Soap vs Body Wash: Which Is Better?

A while back I got curious how much soap I actually use in a single shower. So I weighed a bar before and after, several times, letting it dry fully between uses. It came out to about 2.1 grams per shower on average — which turned out to say more about soap versus body wash than most of the articles I'd read on the subject.

Walk down any personal care aisle and you'll find rows of body wash, shower gel, and soap bars, all promising clean, healthy skin. So which is actually better?

The honest answer is: it depends what matters most to you. Both can clean your skin effectively. They differ in ingredients, packaging, environmental impact, cost, and how they feel on your skin. And it's worth saying up front — not all bar soap is the same. A handcrafted soap made with plant oils and butters is a different product from the inexpensive commercial bars a lot of us grew up with.

For most people, a well-made soap bar is an excellent everyday cleanser, and a genuinely nice one to use. Here's why.

Do Soap and Body Wash Clean Equally Well?

Yes. Both are designed to remove dirt, sweat, excess oil, and other impurities from your skin. A lot of people associate a big lather with better cleaning, but the amount of foam doesn't determine how well something cleans — that comes down to the cleansing ingredients and how the product is formulated.

Used normally, both will leave your skin feeling clean and refreshed. Neither one wins here. Think of it as a tie, and move on to what actually sets them apart.

Which Has the Simpler Ingredients?

This is one of the biggest real differences between the two.

Body wash is mostly water, which means it generally needs preservatives to stay stable on the shelf. Depending on the product, it may also contain synthetic cleansing agents (often called syndets — synthetic detergents), moisturizers, thickeners, fragrance, and colourants. Many of these can be formulated to be mild and effective.

Traditional soap is made differently. Oils and fats are combined with an alkali in a process called saponification, which transforms the oils into soap. When it's made properly, no lye remains in the finished bar. Handmade soap often uses ingredients like olive oil, coconut oil, shea butter, castor oil, clays, botanicals, and essential oils — the kind of ingredient list you could read out loud without tripping over anything.

Worth being clear-eyed here: "natural" doesn't automatically mean better, and "synthetic" doesn't automatically mean worse. Both can be safe and effective. The real difference is closer to philosophy than performance — body wash is typically a more complex, water-based formulation, while soap is a simpler product built by turning oils into soap.

If you like straightforward formulations and ingredients you recognize, soap has a clear appeal.

What About Dryness and Moisture?

This one’s more nuanced than it looks, and worth slowing down for.

Traditional soap runs alkaline, typically somewhere between pH 7.5 and 10, while skin sits closer to pH 5.5. That mismatch is often pointed to as the reason for the tight, dry, “squeaky clean” feeling people associate with soap. Body wash, chemically speaking, is a syndet formula, and it’s usually made closer to skin’s natural pH — which is part of why it’s often positioned as the gentler option.

But formulation matters more than the soap-vs-wash category itself. Handmade cold process soap is commonly “superfatted” — made with a bit more oil than’s strictly needed to fully saponify — which leaves natural glycerin and free oils behind in the bar. That’s a very different product from a stripped-down commercial bar, where the glycerin is often removed and sold separately. Our own bars, for reference, sit around 8-8.5 — on the milder end of that range, and further softened by superfatting.

It’s also worth noting that most of the research on soap and skin barrier damage comes from short-term lab studies (often funded by big cosmetic companies like Unilever and P&G) — a handful of washes over a few days, not months or years of real-world use. One of the few studies that actually looked at the long term found that skin’s own pH-regulating ability held up fine even with sustained soap use — the skin recovered its balance rather than showing cumulative damage. So the picture is less settled than “soap bad, syndet good” headlines suggest, and formulation quality seems to matter more than the category. Well-made, superfatted cold-process soap can be very gentle; poorly formulated syndets body wash can be harsh as well.

For what it's worth, this matches my own experience. Years ago, switching from body wash to a well-made bar made a real difference for skin that used to feel dry and itchy — enough that I never went back. Results will vary person to person, but if body wash hasn't worked for your skin, a good cold process soap is worth trying before writing off soap altogether.

Which Is Better for the Environment?

This is where bar soap has a real, measurable edge.

Say someone showers daily for ten years. A typical shower uses about 9 grams (roughly one pump, or just less than two teaspoons) of body wash. Over ten years, that's about 33 litres — which, in 500 mL bottles, works out to roughly 66 plastic bottles. An average empty 500 mL bottle without a pump weighs about 60 grams and 66 of them would be 3.96 kilograms of plastic.

Using my own number — 2.1 grams of soap per shower — that same ten years comes to about 7.7 kilograms of soap, or roughly 69 bars at 4 oz./112 grams each. Each bar wrapped in about 4 grams of recycled paper adds up to around 276 grams of paper packaging over the decade — less than the weight of a typical hardcover book.

What stands out is that the package count is close either way — about 66 bottles versus 69 wrappers. The difference isn't the count, it's what it's made of — dozens of plastic bottles (almost 4 kilograms) versus a modest stack of paper (276 grams). Body wash also carries a lot of water weight to transport from manufacturer to store to your shower, where a bar of soap is a concentrated solid that ships and packages lighter.

If cutting down on plastic matters to you, bar soap is the simpler choice, and it's not a close call.

Which Offers Better Value?

This turns out to be one of the hardest questions to answer.

A bottle of body wash might cost anywhere from a few dollars at the drugstore to more than $60 from a premium skincare brand. Soap bars can range from under a dollar to well over $20 each. With such a wide range of products, there isn't a single answer to which costs less.

What matters is comparing products that serve a similar purpose and reflect similar values.

For example, if you choose a handcrafted soap because you prefer plant oils, essential oils, small-batch production, minimal packaging, and supporting local small business, it probably doesn't make sense to compare it with the least expensive body wash on the shelf. Likewise, someone buying a premium body wash may be looking for a particular fragrance, packaging, skincare ingredient, or luxury experience that has little to do with basic cleansing.

That said, if you're curious about the numbers, let's do a simple comparison.

Using my "2.1 grams of soap per shower" rate, a 112-gram soap bar provides roughly 53 showers. Our soap sells for $12 per bar, although many customers pay closer to $10 per bar through volume discounts or repeat-purchase discounts.

For body wash, prices vary enormously, but a comparable product made with gentler ingredients might cost anywhere from $15 to $38 for a 500 mL bottle. Using an estimated 9 mL per shower, here's how the numbers work out:

Example Cost Per Shower
Using my measured soap usage of 2.1 g per shower:

• • 112 g soap bar at $12 = about 53 showers = 23¢ per shower
  • 112 g soap bar at $10 = about 53 showers = 19¢ per shower

Using an estimated body wash usage of 9 mL per shower:

• • 500 mL bottle at $15 = about 56 showers = 27¢ per shower
  • 500 mL bottle at $38 = about 56 showers = 68¢ per shower

Actual costs will vary depending on the products you choose and how much you use.

Whether that's good value depends on what matters to you: ingredients, scent, packaging, performance, environmental impact, or simply how much you enjoy using it.

The best value isn't necessarily the cheapest product. It's the one that delivers the experience and qualities that matter most to you.

Is Bar Soap Hygienic?

One of the most common worries about bar soap is whether bacteria can live on it.

Research shows that while bacteria can be present on a used bar, the risk of it transferring anything harmful during normal hand or body washing is extremely low — soap is doing its job of lifting dirt, oils, and microorganisms off your skin as you use it. The main thing that matters is storage: a dish that drains water away helps the bar dry between uses, and keeps it cleaner and in good shape.

Used normally, bar soap isn't less hygienic than body wash. The old worry doesn't hold up to a closer look.

So, Which Is Better?

If you want a simple, effective everyday cleanser, a good soap bar holds up well. It cleans effectively, uses a fairly short list of ingredients, generates very little packaging waste, and tends to be good value over time. Modern handmade soap also isn't the harsh, drying bar that gave soap a bad name decades ago — quite the opposite, if it's made well.

Body wash still has its place — if you prefer a liquid product, want a specific moisturizing ingredient, or need something formulated for a particular skin concern, it can be the better fit. And if plastic bottles are your main concern, you don't necessarily have to give up body wash. Many communities now have refilleries where you can bring your own container and refill it as needed.

For a lot of us, though, a well-made bar offers a genuinely good combination of simplicity, effectiveness, low cost, and low waste. For a product that's been around for thousands of years, a good bar of soap still makes a surprisingly strong case for itself.

Thinking about making the switch?

If you're curious about how a handcrafted soap differs from a typical commercial bar, take a look at our collection of small-batch soaps inspired by nature, all handmade in Toronto, Canada. 

[Browse the handcrafted Essential Collection →]