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Soaps without tallow... Recommendations?

Tallow is defintely my favorite type and it's fine with my oily skin. It's turned into soap, so it's not at all like rubbing fat on your face if thats what you're thinking.

But since you asked for veggie soaps, colonel conk is very affordable with good ingredients like avocado oil. Its easily available on Amazon and target.com. L'Occitane Cade and Crabtree&Evelyn have gotten great reviews and have fancy scents.
 
One of my favorite non-tallow soaps (actually one of my favorite soaps, period) is Institut Karite. In fact, I just shaved with it this morning. Great lather, great on the skin.

Having said that, tallow won't leave your face oily or greasy or cause acne. The fact is, some of the most drying soaps I've tried have tallow in them.

Great soaps can be made with tallow as an ingredient, or completely from vegetable oils. Tallow is simply a mixture of oils such as Oleic, Palmitic, Steric, Myristic & other fatty acids. All of these ingredient are also found in vegetable sources.

It's interesting to note that Oleic Acid is the primary constituent of Tallow (about 47%) and is also the primary constituent in Olive Oil (55-83%) ... Yet using olive oil as a base for a soap provides very poor performance.

This just shows that while all soaps have a lot of ingredients in common, minor variances in ratios of the individual acids AND the process by which the soap is made, how much extra oils are included (super fating) etc. play a HUGE role in the final soap. WHERE those individual fatty acids come from doesn't matter one bit.
 
Bald Frog Soap is glycerin based. You can buy a small amount of it from Larry at Whipped Dog.

No soap is glycerin based. Glycerin is not a soap and can not be made into a soap. It can be added at very high quantities, along with sugars & other agents such as propylene glycol with added SOAP for the lathering/cleaning properties (and often with petroleum based detergents in the case of Conk, VDH & many others) to prevent crystallization of the sodium salts of the various fatty acids, yielding a "Melt & Pour" soap base.

In most cases melt & pour bases are used by many "artisan" soap makers because they can be easily purchased commercially, melted, adjuncts (clays, oils, etc) & scents added, then poured into molds and easily re-sold.

In the case of VDH/Conk petroleum based detergents are added as they are a super cheap, easy way to produce a stable lather at a very cheap price. While I don't use petrol detergent based shave products and I feel there are many down sides to their use I will admit a side "benefit" of detergents is that they are not as adversely affected by water hardness so it can make it easy to get a lather that feels nice even with hard water and/or little experience with making a good lather.
 
No soap is glycerin based. Glycerin is not a soap and can not be made into a soap. It can be added at very high quantities, along with sugars & other agents such as propylene glycol with added SOAP for the lathering/cleaning properties (and often with petroleum based detergents in the case of Conk, VDH & many others) to prevent crystallization of the sodium salts of the various fatty acids, yielding a "Melt & Pour" soap base.

In most cases melt & pour bases are used by many "artisan" soap makers because they can be easily purchased commercially, melted, adjuncts (clays, oils, etc) & scents added, then poured into molds and easily re-sold.

In the case of VDH/Conk petroleum based detergents are added as they are a super cheap, easy way to produce a stable lather at a very cheap price. While I don't use petrol detergent based shave products and I feel there are many down sides to their use I will admit a side "benefit" of detergents is that they are not as adversely affected by water hardness so it can make it easy to get a lather that feels nice even with hard water and/or little experience with making a good lather.

This is a quote from the maker.

"My wife and I make the soap in 1 pound batches to insure quality control, the Bald Frog Soap is made of 3 glycerine bases along with
betonite clay, aloe extract, gensing, and 7 different oils."
 
This is a quote from the maker.

"My wife and I make the soap in 1 pound batches to insure quality control, the Bald Frog Soap is made of 3 glycerine bases along with
betonite clay, aloe extract, gensing, and 7 different oils."

Doesn't matter what the web site says... They are buying 3 different "melt & pour" soaps, mixing them together with clay, aloe etc... Those "bases" have glycerin, various soaps (and probably petrochemical derived detergents) in them, along with propylene glycol & some sort of sugar, such as sorbitol/mannitol. I'll guarantee you that is fact. (notice the "probably" about the artificial detergents - no guarantee of that, as not all melt & pour soaps have detergents, but many do.)
 
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