Bar Soap vs. Body Wash

When it comes to personal hygiene, the choice between bar soap and body wash can sometimes feel like a Coke® v Pepsi® debate, crunchy v creamy. Rather than feeling the pressure to choose a side and stay there, think of bar soap and body wash as merely options in your daily clean routine. Each does their job a little differently to address your body’s demands, but both offer sudsy success. After all, just because you might prefer chocolate doesn’t mean you can’t indulge in a little strawberry sometimes. Let’s get to the bottom of both soap options so that you can choose wisely, and guiltlessly, from now on.

How Bar Soap Cleans:

By breaking up the oily layer on skin that results from sweat and dirt, bar soap dissolves and removes dirt from the skin’s surface.

What’s in Bar Soap:

Like most hygiene products, that depends on the bar soap brand you choose. Some have more than you bargained for—synthetics, parabens, preservatives, fragrances—rather than real ingredients that keep skin clean and safe. Other bar soaps do the job simply and effectively using only natural ingredients to help purify and cleanse skin. Prep U Charcoal Soap, for instance, uses plant-based oils to hydrate skin instead of strip it and never uses any harsh fragrances. As a rule, bar soap typically has less ingredients in it than body wash because it doesn’t need to be shelf stable.

The Benefits of Bar Soap:

Because of its shorter list of ingredients, bar soaps can be beneficial to people with allergies as a hypoallergenic solution. More targeted ingredients also allow bar soap to be a strong contender when it comes to combating specific skin conditions like eczema, acne and rashes. That’s why we can deeply detoxify skin to help treat breakouts with our Charcoal Soap. We use a short list of all-natural ingredients that includes Bentonite clay, Black Walnut powder and activated Bamboo Charcoal to draw out toxins, soften and hydrate skin for clearer, smoother results. 

Bar soap also tends to be the choice of environmentalists seeing as how it usually comes in recyclable or compostable packaging.

Simply put, bar soap tends to be the lower maintenance option of cleansing. Reach for it when you’re looking to treat specific problem areas of skin.

How Body Wash Cleans:

Like bar soap, body wash also dissolves and removes dirt from skin.

What’s in Body Wash:

As we touched on previously, body wash tends to have more ingredients to keep it a shelf-stable liquid and oftentimes, it’s preservatives and other synthetics that help accomplish this. While Prep U 2-in-1 Hair & Body Wash does include a longer list of ingredients than our bar soap, we use only plant-based, all-natural ingredients proven to work gently and effectively to hydrate and moisturize skin. In other words, we’re not suggesting all body washes are harmful, rather that you opt for those with no synthetic ingredients. 

The Benefits of Body Wash: 

The benefits are directly related to that longer list of ingredients we keep mentioning. Assuming your body wash is devoid of parabens, sulfates and other toxins that are very commonly used to create lather and fragrance in body wash, then body wash is a great option for everyday hydration and moisture. In fact, body wash can often be more helpful than bar soap in combating chronic dry, flaky skin because often those added ingredients are designed to coat skin and seal in moisture. Want a little more help in choosing a safe, effective body wash?  We gotcha covered. 

All in all, our advice is to keep both a bottle of body wash and a bar of soap within reach during daily showers. Use an all-natural body wash for daily cleansing when skin is calm or perhaps slightly dry and grab the all-natural bar soap when you need help penetrating the skin more deeply to target problem areas on your face or body.