(223d) Designing a Non-Soap Cleansing Bar

Dove® Beauty Bar was developed in the 1950's by Lever Brothers Co., a subsidiary of Unilever in the United States, and has been the largest selling cleansing bar in the US for decades. Although the design problem was addressed over a half century ago, the product design has stood the test of time, with relatively minor modifications made to the Dove® composition to meet various market demands.

The Dove® composition was identified through an extensive experimental program in the early 1950's. Today a large consumer products company would likely follow a similar iterative, experimental approach, although accumulated data in the public domain about various potential ingredients might make ingredient selection somewhat easier.

While it is tempting to say that a similarly complex composition should be identified today through computer simulation, it is useful to review the product and process design constraints that were actually faced as well as the identified problem solution, as these provide a good point of reference for emerging product design techniques to match.

This paper will therefore review the critical set of product and process attributes, the laboratory techniques that were used to assess these properties, and the experimental program that identified the actual composition and process that gave rise to the product with the required attributes.