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Liquid soap might be de rigeur, but bar soap — that slippery, slidy stuff that sits on the soap tray in your mother’s bathroom, ultimately browning and curling into a disused, decade-old sliver of floral-scented fat — is actually a lot better for the environment, for reasons that might not entirely be obvious at first blush.
Essentially, it all has to do with soap density. Since bar soap takes out the water from the soap, it concentrates it to its essence, making the carbon footprint of actually transporting soap around the world in trucks, or boats, or airplanes significantly less than bar soap.
Even so, bar soap can be unpleasant to use. It’s slippery and tends to shoot out of your hand when you least expect it, shooting out of the barrel of your clenched fist and into your eye like a bullet.
Nathalie Stämpfli’s “Soap Flakes” dispenser is an attempt to fix this problem. Basically, it works just like a liquid soap dispenser, except that Stampfli’s dispensers actually shave little bits of soap off of a bar and into the palms of your hands. There’s two kinds: one is fixed to a wall, as in your favorite local rest room, while the other operates more like a pepper grinder.
We admit, we like, even though it’s a concept instead of a real product. Our favorite thing? Both soap dispensers look like they’d be able to double as a parmesan grater in a pinch.
