Next to Godliness - a Cautionary Tale

When it comes to buying essential items, I am a traditionalist. If it was good enough for me in childhood and it still exists, I'll buy it.  So when I needed something as basic as a bar of soap recently, I pretty soon narrowed the choice down to two that met these criteria - Pears Transparent Soap and Wright's Coal Tar.  Unable to decide between them and being a big spender, I bought one of each.
I remember both brands from my childhood.  Pears brings back memories of the advertisements featuring the painting Bubbles by Millais; and every year, there was a "Miss Pears" competition to find a brand ambassador.  It wasn't exactly the X Factor but it entertained us at the time.  Wright's Coal Tar soap was less strongly marketed but had an image of a no-nonsense, manly approach to cleanliness.  Women might smell of Pink Camay containing some fancy perfume or other (worth 9 guineas an ounce, according to the adverts).  But give us men a sniff and you'd get a whiff of good old coal tar - not that we necessarily knew what coal tar was.
Anyway, arriving home clutching my two contrasting bars of traditional cleanliness, I took the trouble to look at the words on the packaging and began to wish that I hadn't.
Firstly, Pears.  Well, at least the soap is still transparent but there are a few things about it that aren't.  The ingredients, for one.  Old Andrew Pears who started the business back in the late 18th century for sure didn't put etidronic acid in his early bars; and I'm pretty certain that butylated hydroxytoluene was unknown to him, as would have been many of the other 20 or so ingredients.  A bit of research reveals that, up until 2009, the soap was made to a reasonably traditional formula that old Mr. Pears might possibly have approved of - but not any more.
And then there's Wright's Coal Tar soap.  Same problems. Its founder, William Valentine Wright, died in 1877, ironically of a skin infection.  He probably wouldn't recognise the current version of his most famous product, not least because it doesn't actually contain any coal tar.  That may, of course, not be a bad thing.  The European Union has banned the use of coal tar in non-prescription products.  But, instead of being up-front about this, the manufacturers call it "a traditional soap with a coal tar fragrance".  Innocents like me are naive enough to be fooled into thinking that the product is basically the same as it ever was, instead of being stuffed with ingredients that give it a coal tar smell without  the actual coal tar. 
Oh, and by the way, Pears soap is now made in India and Wright's is made in Turkey.  So they've each travelled many hundreds of miles before they plop down into my bath trailing their carbon footprint.
There it is.  I'm not suggesting that either of these products is better or worse than others on the market, just that, if you want to buy a traditional product, maybe it's best to check the label first.