Putnam was quoted by The American Magazine of Art to have wanted to "lift the soap carving out of the amateur and into the professional field," as she believed it had advantages over other, more popularly used mediums.
[4] In 1932, the competition received four thousand entries, with first prize fetching $500 as an award, and winning pieces were exhibited at the Gimbel Brothers' New York store.
[8] Soap carving in Thailand is an art developed from the artistic background of sculpting fruits and vegetables in Thai culture, which originates from the time of the Sukhothai Kingdom.
[22] Exhibitions have also appeared at the National Sculpture Society in San Francisco in 1929[19] and the Nurses' Hobby Show at Rochester General Hospital.
[23] Soap carving has been broadly used as an activity at a range of places, from camps[24] to elementary schools[25][26] to handicap rehabilitation facilities[27] to prisons,[28] across the country from the 1940s through the 1980s.
Soap carving also appeared in the 1970s as the subject of another art medium, poetry, in The Centennial Review by the Michigan State University Press which was written in tribute to Sylvia Plath.
[29] The Milwaukee Art Museum mentions the possibility of carving soap with pen knives, sticks, and hair pins to create scenes, images, or sculptures historically.