A true two-in-one product: soap that is good for the laundry and for your face

CONVENTION, common sense, and chemistry all tell us never to use the soap we use for our bodies on our faces. With this in mind, how would you feel about a thick lather of laundry soap on your face?

Perla soap has been around since 1949, passed around by the Philippine Manufacturing Corp., Procter & Gamble, and then sold to SCPG Asia-Pacific Inc. in this decade. In the almost-70 years since it has been in production, the soap, made of raw materials derived from coconuts, has not changed formulation, according to Perla Brand Specialist Quiel Estrella.

BusinessWorld met Mr. Estrella during a fashion show in SM The Block featuring regular women who happen to be users of Perla. The women were selected from a social media competition held by the brand, and one of the prizes included modeling allwhite outfits on the runway and a chance to meet Perla celebrity endorser Toni Gonzaga.

“This is a celebration of Filipina beauty, Filipina simplicity,” Mr. Estrella said about how the coconut-derived soap symbolizes the Filipino consumer.

CHEMISTRY LESSON

And now a little chemistry: soap is made from fats and an alkaline solution, usually something caustic like lye or sodium or potassium hydroxide. Historically, soaps were made from plant ashes and animal or vegetable fats.

The fat used in Perla is pure coconut oil, which Mr. Estrella is proud to say is sourced from Filipino farmers, making the soap a purely Filipino product. “All of the magic that Perla can do, it’s because of the coconut oil,” he said.

While Perla has always been marketed as a laundry soap (and not a detergent, which is a different substance altogether), it has been a cult tool for skincare, as the households which have used it for ages described that the soap left the skin on the hands soft. Since people noticed how kind the soap was to the skin, they started using it on their faces as well.

“People will still tell you, you have acne breakouts: use Perla. You have skin allergies: use Perla,” said Mr. Estrella.

Perla has also found a niche among households with sensitive skin, because members of their families might get skin reactions from commercial detergents used for their laundry. With today’s growing concern for the environment, some families are switching to newer hypoallergenic detergents — but then, they cost much more than Perla’s price point of something below P20 a bar.

Mr. Estrella says, “It’s about all-natural, and it’s about caring for your skin. But what will you choose? A new product, or a brand built on decades of trust?”

Perhaps it’s a rebellion against the chemicals used in commercial soaps or modernity, but people have been running to age-old secrets like Castile soap or Marseille soap, which have been used for centuries. Mr. Estrella notes that some of the people they have talked to compared Perla to these products, which were developed centuries ago with olive oil and laurel oil.

Mr. Estrella spoke abut the benefits of using the soap for skincare: apparently, the glycerin is kept intact within the soap, so it has a moisturizing factor that won’t dry up your skin. The coconut oil within the soap, he says, penetrates the more easily to nourish the skin, while the lauric acid in the coconut oil attracts oil and dirt away from the skin — and well, your clothes too.

A little too good to be true, but Mr. Estrella says that they have had stringent tests done in thirdparty labs — “Just to make sure that what we’re saying is really true.”

“I cannot market it as a laundry soap and beauty soap at the same time. There will be confusion,” he said. “We just let our consumers talk about it.”

Laundry soap that leaves your clothes softer, and a beauty soap, all in one bar: is there anything Perla can’t do? It sounds too good to be true, but then decades of housewives saying otherwise is hard to refute. Plus, Mr. Estrella himself said that he uses Perla for his own skin (and a cursory look saw small pores and an overall great complexion on Mr. Estrella). Okay, so it’s all anecdotal, and it might all be incidental, and we know that it’s just too frightening a prospect to use the stuff you wash your clothes in on your very own skin. But Mr. Estrella assured us, “Everything that we say, it’s actually proven [in a lab] to be true.” —