12/11/2025
One of the questions that we got after I left Amish, was about homemade soap in the Amish. I didn't know how to answer the question of how to make soap, because I've never made homemade soap in my life, nor did anyone around me. The only person that I could think of in my Amish life, that ever made soap, was one of my Dad's cousins, who lived in a different community. My Dad's cousin would make soap to sell it at our store.
Growing up, the soap we used, was mostly liquid soap, not bar soap and my mom always bought a big jug of "soft soap" liquid soap from Walmart and we used that all the time. Sometimes my mom was gifted a nice hand soap from Bath & Body Works, which is a very popular Christmas gift in the Amish (in our community), and she would save the Bath & Body Works soap until we had company, then she would exchange it with the soft soap in the bathroom. My Grandma loved Bath & Body Works hand soap and she would always buy the seasonal ones and so did my aunts and the people in our church and my friends and everyone around me. I never remember seeing any homemade soap.
There was an Amish lady in our community, that made homemade laundry detergent, which was kind of like a dry powder, or clumps, and she would sell it at our Amish store as well, but there was only a few certain people in our community that use that. My mom tried it and she did not like it, so she would always use Tide. Gain and Tide is the most popular laundry detergent in the Amish, at least for everyone around me, in my Amish life.
We always bought all of our products from a store, such as Walmart or Sam's Club. Just like any non-Amish person. We never made our own, not only soaps and laundry products, but toothpaste, dish soap, household cleaners, shampoo or anything of that sort, we never made.
I'm not 100% sure how common it is for non-Amish people to think that the Amish make their own products such as these, so I'm not sure if this is surprising to you or not, but if it is, then I'm just clearing up the misconceptions, at least from my experience, growing up in the Old Order Amish.
Of course there is some families within the Amish all over, that make some homemade soap, just like there is families in the non-Amish world that make homemade soap. This is not like a community thing, it is a family thing. Just like in the non-Amish world. Amish stores sometimes sell homemade soap, like I mentioned that our family business did, but that does not mean that the Amish use it. And this might be why non-Amish people assume that Amish use homemade soaps, because they see it in the Amish stores.
Because of the comments, let me just say once again that this is my personal experience growing up in the 4th largest Amish community in the world.
