First I made this soap dish in stoneware clay, but with wet hands in a bathroom, it broke during one day of cleaning. Then I 3D-modeled and 3D-printed it in instead. 🙂
I use a plastic called PLA plastic. It is bio-based, made from various vegetable starches, which means it is bio-degradable. Not compostable, but under the right circumstances in an industrial composting facility it will bio-degrade.
Since this soap dish will sit in a bathroom, getting water on it every day from your dripping hands, I chose to make one iteration where I smudge beeswax and flaxseed oil mixture all over it to make it completely water-resistant. It took about two weeks for the PLA to absorb the fat and it gave the plastic a matte and a bit sticky surface. Not ideal. Now that I have tested it out for a good few months nothing has happened with the PLA. Not even the surface finish has changed one tiny bit.
The loofah sponge is a natural sponge, a sea cucumber I think they are called. It absorbed excess moisture so that your soap does not turn to mush. Water can also drip down onto the basin through the hole underneath the loofah. The soap leftovers on the loofah can either be used for body scrubbing if you have the soap dish in the shower for example, or you can use it to clean the basin itself.
Here are some pictures of my process

The final results
Now I want to make them in a completely different material. Just for fun. 🙂