Soap: the most quotidien of the quotidien; also, a nearly 120 billion USD global industry playing both to aspirational consumerism and anxieties of contamination as a reminder of the messiness of our mortal bodies; also, a crystallization of hygiene as a category far exceeding health-related concerns as a phenomenon tied to constructs of race, class, gender, and sexuality; also, art. Soap has appeared as a motif throughout art history—from seventeenth-century Dutch oil painting to twentieth-century Surrealist photography—yet the past three decades have marked a shift from the visual representation to the direct incorporation of soap in installations charged with familiar sensory resonance. Though rife with symbolism, soap far exceeds metaphor as a tactile, aromatic medium that confronts the ontological object-ness of the precious artwork. Whether defamiliarizing soap or reveling in its familiarity, artists across contexts approach the substance through distinct tactics, yet with shared attention to materiality. As a prop implicated in the physical and ideological maintenance of the illusory boundary of the skin, soap confronts the politics of purity. Materially, while also symbolically, soap enables artists to question prevailing fantasies of the discrete, sealed-off human body without playing into the identity politics of figurative representation.