No I kept it quite cold. I think is stinky anyway only wanted to finally try a recipe so I had to use lard instead of tallow.Thanks I hope it's good. Do you know whether Charles r is still online sometimes?
Home made shaving soap
- Thread starter charles_r
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No I kept it quite cold. I think is stinky anyway only wanted to finally try a recipe so I had to use lard instead of tallow.Thanks I hope it's good. Do you know whether Charles r is still online sometimes?
Really no help for me charler_r =(
What problem are you having?
Soap shouldn't really stink. To me saying your soap stinks means it smells rancid, which means you had too much unsaponified fat in it, which then went rancid. This would usually take months or even years depending on the climate. Of course certain fats impart certain scents to soap even after saponification. Cocoa butter for instance, makes a soap that smells chocolatey. So if by "stink" you just mean it smells greasy, then that may be due to the lard.
Soap shouldn't really stink. To me saying your soap stinks means it smells rancid, which means you had too much unsaponified fat in it, which then went rancid. This would usually take months or even years depending on the climate. Of course certain fats impart certain scents to soap even after saponification. Cocoa butter for instance, makes a soap that smells chocolatey. So if by "stink" you just mean it smells greasy, then that may be due to the lard.
I'm new here and just found this thread. I've been making my own bath soaps for years (hot process, in a crockpot), although I quit for a couple of years when Red Devil lye disappeared and haven't really gotten back into it much when Rooto lye came back on the market. Anyway...
I see you are all making mixed sodium/potassium soaps. Is that to make the puck softer? Or just because the commercial shaving soaps contain some potassium soap? The reason I'm asking is castor oil makes a very nice sudsy soap that is gentle on your skin, but it is only used in small percentages in home-made lye soap because it softens the bar too much. Has anyone tried going back to all sodium hydroxide and increasing the castor oil even more?
I've never considered adding stearic acid to a soap recipe because it'll reduce the amount of glycerin in the final product. I will have to look into it.
I see you are all making mixed sodium/potassium soaps. Is that to make the puck softer? Or just because the commercial shaving soaps contain some potassium soap? The reason I'm asking is castor oil makes a very nice sudsy soap that is gentle on your skin, but it is only used in small percentages in home-made lye soap because it softens the bar too much. Has anyone tried going back to all sodium hydroxide and increasing the castor oil even more?
I've never considered adding stearic acid to a soap recipe because it'll reduce the amount of glycerin in the final product. I will have to look into it.
The high ratio of potassium soap to sodium soaps is not to make the soap softer (though that is one of the side effects) but to make the stearic salts more soluble. Shaving soaps containing high amounts of stearic acid perform better as they produce a dense, thick, stable lather which is better for shaving with. Sodium Stearate (i.e. stearic acid saponified with sodium hydroxide) isn't as soluble as potassium stearate so using potassium hydroxide helps unlock all the good lathering properties of the stearic acid (be it from tallow, palm oil, refined stearic acid or some other high-stearic source such as cocoa butter). Note that without the graining out, drying, chipping and plodding processes that most commercial manufacturers use, this will result in a soft bar but artisan soap makers should come to accept this rather than insisting on a hard puck which seems to fit their idea of what a shaving soap should look like (but which is hopeless for shaving with). Several Italian soap makers do produce produce soft soaps (e.g. Cella, P160, Valobra) and these are generally highly regarded.
Commercial manufacturers create a potassium / sodium soap mix because THAT'S been the basis of proper shaving soaps for about 100 years. Things like castor oil or clay have no place in the main base of a shaving soap though they can add a minor improvement to a soap if its formulation is good to begin with. The basic principle to follow is fats high in stearic acid saponified with both potassium and sodium hydroxide = shaving soap.
I'm interested in making my own shaving cream. Are there any suggestions on where to get Cocoa butter from a store? I'd rather not have it shipped to me as I want to keep costs down. If anyone is from the Buffalo NY area that could direct me that would be great!
Thank you,
Thank you,
Sweet! Thank you i'll let everyone know how it goes.
Thank you all for a REALLY wonderful and informative thread full of great information, it's nice to see people sharing their resources, time and progress to help others shorten their learning curve and I will do the same. Hopefully we can keep a resource laden thread that stays on topic to help others and, hopefully the soap makers trying to add a shave soap to their product line.
Alright so, I am not really finding what I want/need in a shaving soap and have concluded that I'm going to have to make my own. I will start out with a 4 pound batch and go from there, this is what I've come up with:
Tallow Beef - 40% (I will render the beef fat myself which should make this free or close)
Stearic Acid - 28%
Cocoa Butter - 16%
Coconut Oil - 8%
Shea Butter - 5%
Jojoba Oil - 2%
Lanolin - 1%
Benonite Clay - 1 Tablespoon per pound
Tussah Silk - A pinch
On soap calc this gives me qualities that seem like they would go well for a shave soap but does anybody see any obvious flaws or issues with my soap design?
Also, I don't know the NoOH and KOH amounts for this design so if somebody would be so kind and to guide me in the proper direction for finding out or would be willing to give me the amounts they feel will work best on a 1 pound batch (I can scale up) I would be thankful.
Thank you again!!!
Alright so, I am not really finding what I want/need in a shaving soap and have concluded that I'm going to have to make my own. I will start out with a 4 pound batch and go from there, this is what I've come up with:
Tallow Beef - 40% (I will render the beef fat myself which should make this free or close)
Stearic Acid - 28%
Cocoa Butter - 16%
Coconut Oil - 8%
Shea Butter - 5%
Jojoba Oil - 2%
Lanolin - 1%
Benonite Clay - 1 Tablespoon per pound
Tussah Silk - A pinch
On soap calc this gives me qualities that seem like they would go well for a shave soap but does anybody see any obvious flaws or issues with my soap design?
Also, I don't know the NoOH and KOH amounts for this design so if somebody would be so kind and to guide me in the proper direction for finding out or would be willing to give me the amounts they feel will work best on a 1 pound batch (I can scale up) I would be thankful.
Thank you again!!!
Looks pretty good on the whole.
Drop the Jojoba Oil. You want to avoid oleic acid, not increase it.
You can include the lanolin but remove it from your calculations as it can't be saponified (increase another fat by 1% to make up the difference).
I'm not a fan of benonite clay or silk and wouldn't include them. You might want to experiment with them in later batches, but only once you are happy with the performance of the soap without them. Also many experienced wet-shavers will run a mile from any shaving soap containing clay as (a few exceptions aside) 99% of them are utterly useless.
Start with a 60 / 40 ratio of KOH / NaOH based on saponfication values and see how that performs. This may produce an Italian-style "croap". Check post #85 on this thread which I made last year on how to do this.
As I'm not a citizen of either the magnificent Republic of Liberia, Myanmar or one other country, my brain doesn't work in pounds. Think metric, and push your total of fats in the batch up to 1 kilo (which is an ideal size for experimenting. I think one pound batches are too small) and simply add a zero to your percentages to give the amount in grams (e.g. 40% tallow becomes 400 grams, 28% stearic acid becomes 280 grams of stearic acid etc). It makes working out your calculations so much easier.
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Thank you for the informative response! I would actually much rather work in metric anyway so you are more than welcome to use it. I do have a few questions:
1) I would rather use the Jojoba than lanolin as I have it sitting around anyway so it's free to me also, in the calculator 2% didn't change the oleic acid values at all. Would the same rule of not applying it to my calculations and adding it like a fragrance instead apply to jojoba as well?
2) Can I figure out the lye/water amounts by calculating a 600g KOH batch and a 400g NaOH batch then combining the lye values and making a single 1,000g batch?
It does make sense to get a baseline without the clay or silk and it seems there are fans of both with and without so I will leave them out, thank you for that suggestion. Any other tips to improve things at all? I raised and slaughtered some hogs last year and rendered a ton of fat so I was hoping to use or at least add some lard however, I have tried to do so with absolutely zero positive results on the calculator so I scrapped that idea.
Thank you again for taking the time to respond.
Youre right that Jojoba doesnt have a very high oleic content (though thats about all it has) and in small quantities it may not make a huge difference. I just have an aversion to using liquid oils in shaving soap and much prefer to only use saturated fats. The soap will be quite soft anyway with all the KOH, so I would be wary of adding anything that makes it softer which is what the jojoba will do. The stearates will produce a thick stable lather but these properties could be partially negated by the jojoba which I suspect could act as a "lather-killer" in the same way that saponified olive and canola oils can do when used in shaving soap. The super-fat ratio provided by all your saturated fats will provide a nice stable moisturizing element so dont think you need to include jojoba to do this. If you do want to use it, Jojoba will saponify so leave it in the calculation. Excess free oil will also kill lather, so dont add jojoba like you would a fragrance post-saponification and dont go overboard with the super-fat ratio with any shaving soap
Yes. Work out what a 60% / 40% split would be of each of the fats you want to use. Calculate one batch being saponified with 100% KOH and the other batch at 100% NAOH, then combine the results to give the required amount of KOH + NAOH + total water.
I will keep you all posted as I go.Logged in again after a longer time. I have problems getting good beef tallow here in Germany....any Ideas what I can take instead of it? Back when I wasn't into Messianic Judaism I tried Lard but it came out stinky and I can't use it anymore cause of religious reasons. I wanna have a lather similar to Proraso or Arko. Thank you for every help. + Can I use talcum instead of kaolin?
- Thread starter
- #134
You could simply try palm oil. You'll just get a vegetable oil soap but they are just as good as tallow (I just put on my flame retardant suit, just in case someone reacts to this).
If you don't have Kaolin, just try without it at first, it will work just as fine for shaving. Some people like having it, many don't. I just like the feel of it on the skin
Yes palm is quite similar in breakdown to tallow. You'd have to tweak your other fat ratio's a bit to adjust for it, but not too much.
Sodium and Potassium soaps are different in a number of ways. The most obvious is that potassium soaps are much softer. Also at the very simplest, you could say that Potassium soaps lather better and are more stable. This is because of two primary reasons. The first is the texture. K soaps being softer makes them easier to load onto the brush and get started. The second is how the soaps interact with water. Sodium salts seem to be much more eager to grab a hold of water and dissolve into it... which means if you over-wet your lather, or lather in a boar brush with nice soaking bristles (which the most popular boar lathering method (Marco's Italian Barber method) does), the sodium (Na) soaps will want to interact with that water and turn into soapy water rather than slightly sloppy/drippy lather. Potassium (K) soaps will tend to hold their structure better despite being overly wet... hence why Marco's method works so well with them. They don't mind (perhaps in some hands even benefit from) having all that excess water sitting there in the depths of the boar knot.
Generally if you don't want to play around with ratio's to strike a balance or tweak a soap in some rather delicate area's... or have a soap that necessitates a bit of technique to lather, you want to use as much potassium and as little sodium as possible. For a beginning soap-maker, you can basically treat K as making your soap easier to lather and Na as making your soap firmer. That's far from the whole story, but it's good enough for a beginner.
Sodium and Potassium soaps are different in a number of ways. The most obvious is that potassium soaps are much softer. Also at the very simplest, you could say that Potassium soaps lather better and are more stable. This is because of two primary reasons. The first is the texture. K soaps being softer makes them easier to load onto the brush and get started. The second is how the soaps interact with water. Sodium salts seem to be much more eager to grab a hold of water and dissolve into it... which means if you over-wet your lather, or lather in a boar brush with nice soaking bristles (which the most popular boar lathering method (Marco's Italian Barber method) does), the sodium (Na) soaps will want to interact with that water and turn into soapy water rather than slightly sloppy/drippy lather. Potassium (K) soaps will tend to hold their structure better despite being overly wet... hence why Marco's method works so well with them. They don't mind (perhaps in some hands even benefit from) having all that excess water sitting there in the depths of the boar knot.
Generally if you don't want to play around with ratio's to strike a balance or tweak a soap in some rather delicate area's... or have a soap that necessitates a bit of technique to lather, you want to use as much potassium and as little sodium as possible. For a beginning soap-maker, you can basically treat K as making your soap easier to lather and Na as making your soap firmer. That's far from the whole story, but it's good enough for a beginner.
I am generally against palm oil. As far as I know there are no sustainably operated palm oil plantations, and even the "organic" ones rely on huge amounts of deforestation and destroy the habitats of endangered species. I don't know about you guys, but I feel a close enough connection to orangutans that I don't want to utterly eliminate them. Not that tallow is great, but it's less bad than palm oil.
As for the lye, why not got with just KOH? I guess it'll make a softer bar, but that's not necessarily bad, right? I feel like if you're making a shave stick that having it be very soft would be nice. One problem I always had with palmolive sticks is that they were so hard that rubbing them on my face left very little soap.
I got a few pounds of suet from the butcher yesterday and rendered a small batch as a test. Filtered it through a mesh strainer, still had some chunks so I will probably use a coffee filter inside the strainer next time. Now that it's solidified it has quite an aroma. Smells like crispy bacon, kind of. Does that mean it was heated too much? I did it over a burner just ft in the pan, I think next time I'm gonna try a wet render in a crock pot
As for the lye, why not got with just KOH? I guess it'll make a softer bar, but that's not necessarily bad, right? I feel like if you're making a shave stick that having it be very soft would be nice. One problem I always had with palmolive sticks is that they were so hard that rubbing them on my face left very little soap.
I got a few pounds of suet from the butcher yesterday and rendered a small batch as a test. Filtered it through a mesh strainer, still had some chunks so I will probably use a coffee filter inside the strainer next time. Now that it's solidified it has quite an aroma. Smells like crispy bacon, kind of. Does that mean it was heated too much? I did it over a burner just ft in the pan, I think next time I'm gonna try a wet render in a crock pot
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honestly, i thought of making my own soap as i do other things, but the cost of making it outweighed actually buying a satisfying soap already made
Nobody?
I made a 90% KOH / 10% NaOH batch thinking it would be great but it turned out not to be very good at all. I realized later that the reason was that the super-fat percentage ended up being too high and excess free fat was killing the lather. Lye calculators assume that you are using 100% pure saponification agents. While it is relatively easy to find 99%+ NaOH, the same is not the case for KOH. Most is only about 90% pure and sometimes it is advertised as only being 85%. The stated purity and the actual purity can also be quite different depending on how it has been stored from the moment it was manufactured as KOH is highly hygroscopic (absorbs moisture from the air). If left in a non air-tight container for even a short period (a couple of days) the purity will further reduce as the amount of water contained within the KOH flakes rises (thus throwing out the calculations). I'm not aware of a D.I.Y method to assay the purity of KOH so one can only go on what is stated by the supplier.
Where as my 60 / 40 soap contained enough pure NaOH to stop the superfat percentage blowing out, the same wasn't the case with a 90 / 10 ratio. I know that many commercial soap manufacturers actually make their soap with an excess of lye resulting in zero-percent excess fat. Once all the fat has been saponified, extra molten stearic acid is added to use up any remaining lye and to add the moisturizing component. This also reduces the chance of any rancidity if using tallow as no free tallow remains and stearic acid is so stable. What I'm not sure about is how commercial manufacturers measure and monitor the amount of excess lye / excess fat in the process (pH levels?).
For making a high KOH ratio shaving soap on a D.I.Y basis, I've found the best solution is to drop the superfat percentage in the calculations down to around 2% - 3%. With less than 100% pure KOH, the result will probably end up being closer to 4% - 5% superfat. I find that any higher than 5% and it starts to interfere with the lather.
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Here's a thread I did on a DIY vegan shaving soap using similar ingredients to MdeC.
http://badgerandblade.com/vb/showth...n-Illustrated-Guide-to-a-Test-Batch-LONG-POST
You'd need to have a rabbi approve your facilities for it to be fully kosher, but it should meet your requirements.
