Home made shaving soap

[charles_r]

Hi everyone.. I know this has been discussed before, but I had to ask everyone's opinion.

SWMBO makes soap as a hobby, for our personal use and for gifts. She tried making a shaving soap for me using that recipe at about.com. The results were as expected. It's now being used in the shower. It just dried out my face like crazy and started burning on the second pass. Also, the lather didn't hold. The next day, I was back to my Mama bear soap. That about.com recipe assumes that upping the castor oil a little (9%) and adding bentonite clay is all there is to shaving soap...

I've been reading a LOT about shave soap recipes and i've come upon a few bits of information:
Olive oil in large quantitys is no good is shaving soap. It kills lather
Lots more castor oil can be used.
Coconut oils in large quantitys can be very drying.
Clay does not turn a regular soap into shaving soap, but does give a little extra slip.

After all the reading, using soap calc, I changed the original recipe:
olive oil 5% (down from 40%)
coconut oil 15% (down from 30%)
Palm oil 50% (up from 22%)
Castor oil 20% (up from 8%)
Cocoa butter 10% (none in original recipe).
We still added 1 tablespoon of clay to the oils and we used kaolin instead of bentonite this time. 1 tablespoon of glycerine was also added at trace. I'm hoping it will help the lather a little.

Lye is discounted at 5%.

What these changes did, according to soapcalc, was decrease the cleansing factor of the bar a LOT, increase the bubblyness a little, and increase the creamyness a LOT. We did a very small batch, only a 4 oz puck to see how this recipe would be. The last time we did 2 pounds.... Worst case, I'll wash in the shower with it again. It's still fun trying :)

I will know the results in about 4-6 weeks, but I was wondering if any soapmakers were able to give me their opinion? Or suggestions for improvement? I might be doing another try soon replacing the cocoa butter with shea butter (for it's stearic content), or maybe we will just replace the palm oil with tallow, if I can get my hands on some.

Thanks!

[Quintar]

drop the olive oil completely. it has no business being in shaving soap. drop the clay too. no good retail shaving soap i know of uses clay. i think it just makes the lather gritty and possibly dulls your blade faster. you can up the stearic acid by using castor and cocoa butter but most people supplement with pure stearic acid to get appropriate levels i think around 20% if i recall correctly. no need to add glycerin you are making plenty already plus you have a 5% discount so have leftover oil in the soap. I don't think shea butter is high in stearic acid...but cocoa butter definitely is. if you can get tallow then use it. tallow, stearic acid and coconut oil is the basic recipe that most shaving soaps are based on. you might also want to look into getting KOH in the mix with NaOH to saponify with as it makes a nicer soap and purportedly helps get full benifit of the stearic acid...

[charles_r]

Thanks for the tips Quintar. I was considering adding stearic acid to the mix if this puck failed. We do have some KOH here, used for liquid soaps. I didn't know one could with it with NaOH.

[MissJames]

I have been wondering the same myself. Sounds like a great recipe. I dislike clay in soaps too because it dries out my skin terribly (I have dry skin).

I prefer the quality that shea gives to soap as opposed to cocoa butter. But that is just preferrence. Coconut oil also gives better lather in hard water (it will lather in sea water) and if you super fat enough it won't be drying at all just very cleansing so good for oily skin.

I am really wanting to try tallow. They say palm is the best substitute, but I want to try the real thing.

[Fortitudo Dei]

Saponify with something like a 60 / 40 ratio of Potassium Hydroxide to Sodium Hydroxide (or even 66 / 33). Note that this ratio division is calculated in terms of the saponification value - not weight.
Try to get the purest KOH you can find. I've found some vendors selling KOH which is only around 90% pure which is low enough to start to muck up your calculations (and increases the chances of DOS). The purest KOH I've found has come from companies supplying those making D.I.Y biodiesel.

The soap will be a softer but the sodium hydroxide will give it enough body for it to form a hard bar. The resulting potassium stearate is much more soluble in water than sodium stearate which means the properties of the stearic acid (principally a very dense creamy lather) can be fully utilised.
A bias towards potassium hydroxide over sodium hydroxide is common practice in commercial shaving soap making and this is why the potassium salts are often listed before the sodium salts in the ingredient list. One commercial shaving soap I know of that didn't do this was the (old) reformulated Erasmic shaving stick. It contains no potassium salts at all and is regarded one of the most useless commercially-made shaving soaps of all time.

[charles_r]

Hi everyone...

So here's what my test puck #2 will look like (will try this next weekend)
Coconut Oil 20%
Castor Oil 20%
Palm Oil 50%
Cocoa Butter 5%
Shea Butter 5%
I'm keeping the lye discount at 5% and I won't add in any clay or extra glycerin.

I would love to try the 60/40 mix of KOH to NAOH for puck #2, but I can't seem to find any site that has a lye calculator for this purpose. They all pretty much a selection box with choice of KOH or NAOH. I'm also unsure on how to prepare the lye if i'm mixing the two... should I prepare the two types separately and then add to the oils, or just prepare them together in a single container? With our current level of knowledge, any reference I can read would be great.

If I can get the info on the lye/water calculations, I will also make a puck #3, replacing the 5% cocoa butter with 5% stearic acid.

For now, I'll skip the tallow, simply because I cannot get it locally and we are no where near an order with our supplier. (the shipping would be a deal breaker for a single item).

Thanks for the info everyone, if I ever manage to make even a half decent shaving soap, i'll share the recipe :)

[ahoiberg]

you can up the stearic acid by using castor oil...

I don't think shea butter is high in stearic acid...but cocoa butter definitely is. if you can get tallow then use it.

not to be a smartass, but castor oil doesn't contain any stearic. it's 90% ricinoleic, plus some oleic and linoleic. and shea butter has a higher stearic content than cocoa butter. shea = 40%, cb = 33%. kokum butter is the best one to use in shaving soap, if you can find it (55% stearic).

tallow is super easy to make yourself from cow fat if you can't find a source for it. and from what i've read, extra glycerin still helps lather. as far as qualities go, you want low cleansing, low bubbly (relatively), high stable, and high conditioning. a little avocado oil in there works nicely also (~5%).

[kingfisher]

Keep us updated with the results.

[charles_r]

We just unmolded the soap after 24 hours. It's a little on the soft side, but it's still a bar.
I found a little chunk the size of a penny stuck to the mold.

I was just too curious. I took my cheap 4$ turkish brush and tried the soap penny, which was probably still a little caustic.

This is what I got. And the lather didn't collapse... (after 20 minutes I just dumped it in the sink). Hopefully it will be even better in a month after it's cured. I'll try it when it's ready

Smells good too.. eucalyptus/mint

[daitmart]

how did it work out after a month.. looks fantastic so far. Good job

[mharris127]

I am very interested as well. The lather you show looks pretty good, you may have a new business to get into (Mama Bear started out in her home as well IIRC).

[ahoiberg]

interesting that you used 50% stearic acid... i've never seen/read about using it in amounts that high. but it looks like you've got a nice lather for a 24hr cure! definitely update when you get a chance. i've got a recipe curing right now that i can't wait to try out.

[charles_r]

thanks for your comments everyone! The bars aren't quite as soft as when I unmolded. I'm going on vacation soon, but I'll try out the soap when I get back on the 23rd. If it works out well, I might try another batch and try to add something conditioning.. (avocado oil maybe?). maybe tryu hot process instead of cold process too, which i've never done yet

[charles_r]

Hi everyone, I just tried the soap this morning. It worked out OK. The lather seemed to need a little more work to make than let's say Mama Bear's, but that could just be me getting to know a new soap. It seems to be very hungry for water. I had two days of stubble, so I decided to use my slant instead of my daily EJ89. The shave was comfortable with no nicks or cuts. my face felt very soft when I was done. So now that I have a decent base to work with, I might try changing things A LITTLE on the next few batches to see how it goes. Maybe I'll try adding the clay, since the jury is still out on that one. If anyone wants to try out my recipe, and does any good changes, please post them here. thanks!

[breadstick]

Good luck with this. My wife makes bath soap but just can't seem to get shaving soap to work out.

[charles_r]

Hi everyone, this is an OLD thread of mine, but since then I have done two other recipes, that all worked well. However, I now know what works best for ME. Honestly, I have a few commercial and artisan soap and lately I just always seem to grab the ones I made. Also, as it turns out, i'm in the pro clay camp. Clay thrown into regular soap does not make it a shaving soap, but clay thrown into shaving soap makes it a better shaving soap. I like how to skin feels after the shave when there's added clay. I've tried Bentonite and Kaolin. Both are nice. Benonite feels a little nicer, but the soap ends up greyish. Kaolin is better than no clay, and the soap stays white.

I won't be making a commercial venture out of this, so I thought I would share my final recipe for others to try. (i'm an open source software nut too)
For one pound of shaving soap:
Oils
Beef Tallow 165g (33%)
Stearic Acid 165g (33%)
Coconut Oil 100g (20%)
Castor Oil 70g (14%)

Lye
Sodium Hydroxide (NAOH) 25.2g
Potassium Hydroxie (KOH) 65.6g
Distilled/Purified Water 180g
This is a 35% NaOH to 65% KOH ratio in snowdrift farm's calculator.

I use about 1 "large" TBSP of clay. I create a slurry with the clay using either glycerine or more castor oil. You could probably use any liquid oil you want for this purpose. Don't add to much oil. Just enough so that the clay is no longer a powder. This avoids clay specs in the final product. When that's done, I add them to the oil and stick blend a little bit so that the clay is well dispersed. If you don't like clay... well don't add it :)

If I do any more experimenting, it might be reducing the stearic a little to replace by skin goodies like 5% avocado oil or cocoa butter but for now I have enough soap to last me a couple of years. The latest batch was to give away at christmas. Now I just have to find really inexpensive giveaway brushes.

If anyone would ever like to try this but don't do your own soap, i'm sure we could work something out (I just can't afford the shipping costs these days, my wife is jobless at the moment) or maybe another local member of B&B could make a batch.

If you try this, I would love to hear your comments

[BentonClay]

..... Now I just have to find really inexpensive giveaway brushes.....

Not sure where you are located, but in Canada the Dollar Store seems to carry low end boar brushes as a stock item. A friend of mine bought a couple of dozen for a similar project. She didn't like the look so she masked off the brush part and lacquered the handles with brown spray paint (I forget the brand, but its the kind that bonds with plastic). She paid a dollar each for the brushes and $8 for the spray paint.

[Quintar]

I won't be making a commercial venture out of this, so I thought I would share my final recipe for others to try. (i'm an open source software nut too)
For one pound of shaving soap:
Oils
Beef Tallow 165g (33%)
Stearic Acid 165g (33%)
Coconut Oil 100g (20%)
Castor Oil 70g (14%)

Lye
Sodium Hydroxide (NAOH) 25.2g
Potassium Hydroxie (KOH) 65.6g
Distilled/Purified Water 180g
This is a 35% NaOH to 65% KOH ratio in snowdrift farm's calculator.

Looks like a great recipe! how does it compare to some commercial soaps? Like which one would you say it's closest to?

[charles_r]

Quintar, I haven't tried a ton of commercial products. i've used Arko, Williams, Proraso (soap not cream), Vitos green and mama bear's. The Proraso was my first soap but I don't like the cold effect during the same. I would say it lathers about as easily as mama bear's but isen't quite as slick as a glycerine soap. I liked Vitos, but it I think it has a tendency to dry up quickly. My soap seems to need a little more water to lather up, but stays moist longer. Arko is a good performer and leaves the face feeling nice, but we all know how great it smells. My soap leaves the face feeling great too. I don't know what it is about it really. I thought maybe was the bentonite acting sort of like a face mask, but i'm not sure. After the first few uses, I think it softened up my omega boar brush a little bit (I could be hallucinating too).

Benton, no brushes at Dollorama here. Quebec is a dry-land for real shaving products except for a local grocery store which has the entire Proraso line. I go to Toronto every now and then for work, if I go this month i'll have a look, but thanks for the tip!

[HollyGates]

Hi there, thanks for posting this charles_r. I'm really looking forward to (eventually) moving to exclusive use of homemade shave soap.

I just tried a small batch of this last night:

66g palm
66g stearic
40g coconut
28g castor

10g NaOH
26.2g KOH
72.7g H2O

1 tsp kaolin
1 tsp peppermint oil

Before last night I've never made soap before, but I've been wanting to get into it for a little while. First I made a similarly sized cold process batch of a NaOH bar soap castille variation, which went fine (to my untrained eye). I had all the stuff out and had ordered the materials for your recipe (palm subbed for tallow though), so I decided to try it out. Everything went ok until I put the hydroxides into the oil. Hydroxide was 41C, oil was 48C. The second I turned on the stick blender it turned into mashed potatoes! I tried mixing it up with a spatula and packing into a PVC pipe. We'll see if it turns out but I'm not too hopeful. Re-reading this thread, it seems you went to hot process to solve this problem. Any advice, other than going to HP?

Thanks again,
-Holly

Hi everyone, this is an OLD thread of mine, but since then I have done two other recipes, that all worked well. However, I now know what works best for ME. Honestly, I have a few commercial and artisan soap and lately I just always seem to grab the ones I made. Also, as it turns out, i'm in the pro clay camp. Clay thrown into regular soap does not make it a shaving soap, but clay thrown into shaving soap makes it a better shaving soap. I like how to skin feels after the shave when there's added clay. I've tried Bentonite and Kaolin. Both are nice. Benonite feels a little nicer, but the soap ends up greyish. Kaolin is better than no clay, and the soap stays white.

I won't be making a commercial venture out of this, so I thought I would share my final recipe for others to try. (i'm an open source software nut too)
For one pound of shaving soap:
Oils
Beef Tallow 165g (33%)
Stearic Acid 165g (33%)
Coconut Oil 100g (20%)
Castor Oil 70g (14%)

Lye
Sodium Hydroxide (NAOH) 25.2g
Potassium Hydroxie (KOH) 65.6g
Distilled/Purified Water 180g
This is a 35% NaOH to 65% KOH ratio in snowdrift farm's calculator.