h a l f b a k e r yNot so much a thought experiment as a single neuron misfire.
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Soap is easy to make. Just work out how much a mole of the relevant oil is, match it with caustic soda, dissolve in distilled water and mix in with the lipid and you have soap.
Given this, we are greasy people. We secrete sebum onto our hair and through sebaceous glands. Wouldn't it be neat if
we could wash ourselves with our own grease?
So it's a very simple idea: save up lots of your hair and skin grease in a container, maybe by rinsing hair and skin in plain water and boiling it away for a bit, then add the relevant quantity of lye and you have soap made from sebum.
I actually think this would be quite a good soap.
Humanolin
It_27s_20Not_20Lano...It_27s_20Humanolin!
A man-made moisturizer to go with your Secretion Soap... [robinism, Oct 23 2010]
[link]
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Why not combine the process of making the soap with the process of using it? |
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In other words, rub lye into your skin until you feel clean. |
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What could possibly go wrong? |
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agh! I'm trying to eat my lunch here! |
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I did consider rubbing sodium hydroxide into my skin but i think it might have a couple of side effects. Incidentally, i absolutely plan to do this, and i'll post photos. |
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[Bigsleep], the grease is emulsified rather than gone and i think could be centrifuged, boiled off to leave a sludgy layer or something before adding lye, but i meant rinsing. Rinse hair and skin in water, then wash in different water. |
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No, i was actually thinking margarine because of the physiological secretion of trans fatty acids in sebum. |
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You have a small group of people who never wash and you use them to provide soap for some of the group of people who do. Money for the depressed and homeless. |
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Seriously though, think about it. Contains natural skin oils, hypoallergenic, what's not to like? |
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WTF is the idea? Let's pretend 1580 is a relevant
fucking year and let's yearn for old bad ideas as if
they are Good and fuck. fuck fuck..... fuck FUCK
[marked-for-deletion]. |
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Fair enough but i'm still going to do it, i still think it's a good idea and i'm completely serious about the central idea. |
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And the idea is to use sebum as the oil for soap. It's very clear and can be and will be baked in a few weeks' time, in this very building, and i can post photos as evidence. |
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Some ancient cultures would wash by bathing in olive oil and then scraping it off again with a scrapy thing. And I had a hamam once which is a similar sort of process, only conducted in a steam-room and with a scrubby thing first to rub off all your skin, followed by a scrapy thing to get the oily stuff (and bits of skin) off. |
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The problem I (and I suspect, others) have with the idea is the notion of 'cleanliness' and its notional incompatability with the long-term storage of bodily secretions. |
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Also, how are you supposed to collect all these secretions if you keep washing them off with soap? (Soap made from your bodily secretions that you are no-longer able to collect because you're washing them off with soap, which therefore can't exist, leaving you able to collect them again, allowing you to wash, making you unable to make any more soap...) - it's just not sustainable - *UNLESS* you designate one member of the family as a sebum source and forbid them to wash, serving as a sustainable sebum source so that the rest of the family may enjoy the cleansing fruits of their sweat, and other oily secretions. [oh, you mentioned that option already!] |
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But, much of this idea has been covered in that most millenial of millenial angst, ennui driven books/films; 'Fight Club' - was it not? Except that they used human body fats stolen from the bins at the back of lyposuction clinics. |
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No, it's not like 'Fight Club' because the fat in adipose tissue is of an entirely different character. Its fatty acids are saturated and not twisted, and i feel sure it's higher in water and other things than sebum is. Fat is very different than sebum, in fact all biological lipids i know of are. |
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You don't wash them off with soap, that's not the idea. If it were, it could still be extracted. The idea is to rinse them off with water, free from soap. You could still do it with soap if you weighed the soapy water before and after use, then evaporated off the water. |
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The presence of salt in the sebum is a possible problem. Sweat is no good for this purpose. |
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It could possibly store quite well because of its composition. It contains alpha globulins and the fatty acids are themselves bactericidal. Refrigeration might be helpful. |
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Well, when you put it *that* way...[-] |
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Everything we drink, eat and breathe has at some point gone through an icky phase. Why is this different? If you're in a room with strangers, chances are you're breathing in droplets of mucus from each others' lungs. Why isn't that a problem and this is? |
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Hands up anyone who thinks that breathing in droplets of
mucus from other people's lungs is not a problem... |
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I have a cold right now, so i'm typing with my nose. |
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"Secretion Soap - now available from all good grosseries." |
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[No hands up] I keep trying to see this is as an HB
joke. THEN I kind of like it...a little. |
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Using Secretion Soap, for me, is too much like
...breathing in droplets of mucus from each others'
lungs....on purpose. |
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Suppose the stuff were to be synthesised in a factory from paraffin and saponified there, but chemically identical. Would that make it more appealing? Why? |
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You are about to reveal something about paraffin that
I don't think I want to know, aren't you? |
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// Would that make it more appealing? Why?// |
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//Incidentally, i absolutely plan to do this, and i'll post photos// [m-f-t] |
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[daseva]O_o Do you need someone to talk to? |
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// "Secretion Soap - now available from all good grosseries." // |
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Even the Ferengi wouldn't do this .... EEEeeeeEEEEEwwwww ... |
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Speaking of gross and ick factors, there was some item a
long
time ago about a class of students in Japan (maybe China). |
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As a class science project, they had all excercised
vigorously
wearing plastic bags, and collected their sweat. From this,
they had produced salt, which their headmaster proudly
sprinkled on his food. |
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That has to be Japan, they're all VERY weird ... |
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I sometimes wonder if i might be Japanese. |
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I sometimes wonder if I might be Archdiocese |
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// i might be Japanese // |
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Check for these telltale signs: |
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1. A barely containable lust to slaughter endangered species. |
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2. A total inability to say "sorry" to people you've treated badly. |
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3. A tendency to re-write history to make out that you actually did nothing wrong, ever. |
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4. A craving for a lifestyle which involves combining the creation of superb paintings, poetry, caligraphy and ceramics with slicing people's heads off with extremely sharp curved single-edged swords. |
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// I might be Archdiocese // |
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Check for an Archdeacon ("The Crook at the head of a Bishop's Staff") |
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the latest in our Soylent product line... |
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Maybe i'm Archimandrite instead then. |
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Aren't those the sort of curled-up squid thingies with a shell that mostly went extinct in your planet's Carboniferous era ? |
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No, you're thinking of investment bankers. |
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What's the curled-up squid thingie with a shell, then ? |
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Investment bankers, weren't you listening? |
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To be fair, I type quietly. |
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So what's an Archimandrite ? |
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It's a deposit consisting of a mixture of soap scum, hair and
limescale which forms on the edge of a bathtub. |
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We're sorry we asked, now. |
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These investment-banker curled-up-squid-thingies with-a-shell, are they worth much ? We have load of them ... |
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No you don't. I can hear you typing annos on at least
two other ideas right now. |
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[placeholder for witty riposte] |
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//It's a deposit consisting of a mixture of soap scum,
hair and limescale which forms on the edge of a
bathtub. |
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Oh THAT'S an Archimandrite! Would it be possible,do
you think, to run some through a distillery/centrifuge
thingy and extract some sebum from it to make
Secretion Soap? |
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Only if you has a particularly sick, evil, amoral, sociopathic personality ... Oh sorry, it's you, [Boom]. In which case, yes. |
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Sorry. I went into autopilot-reverse-engineering
mode, there, for a moment. I'm trying to quit. |
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Give it up, it's not worth it. |
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Do you feel under-appreciated, [nineteenthly]? Misunderstood? Vilified? (I'm not going to say anything to change that; I was just being a curious sociopath pretending to empathize) But, about your idea: I would bun if I got to pick the famous Hollywood Starlet whose lipids I would then share in the shower. To boil this anno down a little further, I would only go for it if it's not my own, uh, "product." Angelina? Paris? (...might get a little buzz off that one...) Mariah? |
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I would even try it on flapjacks. |
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Glycerol is an ingredient in some flapjacks so you could have celebrity liposuction byproduct flapjacks if you wanted. |
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// Do you feel under-appreciated, [nineteenthly]? Misunderstood? Vilified? // |
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Is that an advertising pitch? No i don't, it's partly a sort of experiment. |
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Since <20's would be the highest producers I'm sure we can shoehorn "smells like teen spirit" in there somewhere. |
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Well indeed. Replacement for paper rounds. |
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Excellent! I'll have a short stack with Lindsay Lohan byproduct! (Now I KNOW I'm gonna need a taxi and a Rehab Center...) [+] |
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How about salvaging the idea as a product name? "Secretion Removal Soap", from the makers of "Fecal Residue Paper" and "Puss Bandages". Ask about our full line of baby and feminine hygene products. |
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You could extract the fibre from faeces and make it into toilet paper. |
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//You could extract the fibre from faeces and make it
into toilet paper.// |
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I wondered how long it would take someone to get
around to this. But, I didn't think it would be you
[19thly]. Very resilient of you...or maybe relentless
is a better word. |
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This whole idea could be improved vastly by deleting it. |
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But if i did that you'd miss out on the photos. Also, given a suspension of the yuck response, i honestly believe it's a good idea. We make this stuff for free, we don't have to go out of our way to obtain it, and if we made it into soap it'd be rich in "natural" oils and probably hypoallergenic compared to, for example, almond oil soap. Also, since it's trans, the soap it made would be quite firm and durable. I know it sounds very much like a troll idea, but i really do think it'd work well. If you don't like the source, have it synthesised from something else. But we do yucky things all day long without thinking about them, and just learn to tune them out. |
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They're going to turn up in the Other Place even if i do delete it. |
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