My shaving soap

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Gabriel_Gago

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Firstly, i would like to apologize to the moderators since i just realized i posted in the wrong place. Since i'm a moderator too, i'm double-ashamed ! =P

Sorry 'bot that, i would kindly ask to move my post to the right place if you please.

Welcome, Gabriel! And don't worry about your English....you'll be just fine. We'd love for you to post pictures of your work! Happy soaping! :wave:

Sure thing! ill attach a picture of last weeks shipment of products. It was a group buy of my forum. And some lather pics of my soaps too =)

BTW, ill leave the forum link here if anyone wants to pay us a visit. Of course it is in portuguese, but...youll never know =P

https://www.barbeartradicional.com.br/forum/portal.php


Gabriel, Olá e bem vindo! Seu inglês é muito bom. Não se preocupe.

Very funny!

My nephew married a lovely Brazilian lady (born in the USA) in the chapel at the base of the statue of Christ The Redeemer in Rio. 25 wedding guests stayed at a Villa 3 blocks away from Ipanema Beach. Both of their children are bi-lingual. You live in a beautiful fun-loving city. I'm so happy to have you join us.

If you don't mind, I'd like your opinion... Does stearic acid + coconut oil or tallow make a good shaving soap?

Wow, that sounds lovely!

Last year my lady and i decided to make it official and get married. This place was one of my first choices, but i called there and they did not have an date for the next three years!

Of course i did not have three years. If i gave my wife three years to think about it, she shure would realize her mistake, so we married last May :mrgreen:
It was great, my wife arranged the whole thing, and i never thought it could be this awesome, we picked a nice little cozy church on the top of a hill, and man... i dont remember much because of all the champagne going around, but people keep telling me it was awesome =P

As for your question, my thoughts of it are:

Stearic acid should ALWAYS be on a shaving soap, so you are in the right spot there.

Coconut oil is great to help gives the lather a "kickstart", but its very "foamy" , making large bubbles, and its very "cleanser" too. Both characteristics are not very appreciated in the wet-shaving community, and i have always preferred to use Palm kernel oil, castor oil, or babassu oil in its place.

You CAN make a great soap using it, like WSP (Wet Shaing Products) do, but i would avise you to keep it around 20-25% and compensate the cleansing with a nice butter like cupuaçú, shea butter, or simply adding glycerin.

Tallow on the other hand its like a magical word for wet-shavers. It does have really nice effects on the lather, making a dense and stable lather, besides great gliding on the razor too. But it does not really help on the "bubbly" effect, making a slow-forming lather. SO, it would not hurt adding some, but not much, "bubbly" oil like castor, coconut, PKO, babassu, etc.

Be aware that both coconut oil and tallow hardens a shaving soap a lot, so you should also consider beforehand what kind of shaving soap you want to make; Soft shaving soap like italians do, or hard shaving soaps like english ones.

I try to please everybody and i make four different types of shaving soaps; Tallow-based, vegetable only, harder ones and softer ones.

I hope this was useful, if i could hbe of any help, please let me know. ;)

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Welcome to the forum! Your products look great! Shaving soap is on my list to try! Do you have a "starter" recipe you recommend? I'm not asking for your special secret recipe.
 
Welcome to the forum! Your products look great! Shaving soap is on my list to try! Do you have a "starter" recipe you recommend? I'm not asking for your special secret recipe.

Thank you!

Yes, i do. Since our colleague mentioned stearic acid coconut oil, ill give you a nice Hot process starter recipe of just Stearic acid + coconut oil.

Why this one? Because its simple and effective, and after making it you'll have a solid start to your shaving soap and will naturally start to experiment with different oils in the future more of your liking. Or not! =P

--
Stearic acid 80%
Coconut oil 20%

Dual lye with 60% KOH and 40% Naoh
Superfat 3%
Lye concentration 30%

After trace is complete and the soap almost cold, i add 10% of total batch weight of Glycerin mixed with the FO /EO.

--

I mentioned before the WSP soap, and obviously i dont know his recipe, but i do think it has to be very near this one.

Good luck, and let me know if i could be of any help with it ;)
 
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Last year my lady and i decided to make it official and get married. This place was one of my first choices, but i called there and they did not have an date for the next three years! Of course i did not have three years. If i gave my wife three years to think about it, she shure would realize her mistake, so we married last May
You're a funny guy. You made me laugh again! As it happens, my nephew's wedding was 3 years in the making, but he didn't know it. His clever wife booked the chapel early when they were there for Carnaval! and just waited for him to come around to her way of thinking!

I hope this was useful
Awesome! Thank you very much!
 
You're a funny guy. You made me laugh again! As it happens, my nephew's wedding was 3 years in the making, but he didn't know it. His clever wife booked the chapel early when they were there for Carnaval! and just waited for him to come around to her way of thinking!


Awesome! Thank you very much!
[emoji6]
 
Welcome and thank you for sharing a recipe. I've been meaning to try a simple shave soap without tallow and this is perfect. I did add some coco butter as SF.

It's in the mold now but I wonder if I made a mistake, will it be hard enough to remove from a mold or should I have used a tub?
 
Welcome and thank you for sharing a recipe. I've been meaning to try a simple shave soap without tallow and this is perfect. I did add some coco butter as SF.

It's in the mold now but I wonder if I made a mistake, will it be hard enough to remove from a mold or should I have used a tub?

I always pour the soap directly in the tubs (like the one in my avatar) and leave it without the lid to cool off, as It should not get very hard.

I'll leave a picture of some samples I made so you can have a notion.
43bb3471ed0da32f1c935be67fb91f9f.jpg
 
Thank you, kind of figured thats what I should have done. Oh well, I'll pop the mold in the freezer later so I can get the soap out then squish the pucks into a tub.
In your case it should be a little harder because of the coconut oil and the cocoa, but not by much. You can simply scoop it with a spoon and mold into a tub later with little hassle too, don't worry about it.

Let me now how it turns out! =)
 
It was firm enough to pop it right out of the thin silicone mold I used. Ended up with 8, 4oz containers. Did a test lather lather on my hand, seems really nice. Thick, slick lather. I'll shave my legs later and see how it compares to my shave soap with tallow.
 
It was firm enough to pop it right out of the thin silicone mold I used. Ended up with 8, 4oz containers. Did a test lather lather on my hand, seems really nice. Thick, slick lather. I'll shave my legs later and see how it compares to my shave soap with tallow.

Oh, good!

Coconut oil compared to tallow, should give you more volume and easier lather, but less cushion and moisturizing.

Of course it depends on the rest of the ingredients, but for shaving legs, since I don't see my wife at least applying anything to her legs after the shower, you did a nice thing adding cocoa butter to compensate the cleansing of the coconut oil.
 
It was firm enough to pop it right out of the thin silicone mold I used. Ended up with 8, 4oz containers. Did a test lather lather on my hand, seems really nice. Thick, slick lather. I'll shave my legs later and see how it compares to my shave soap with tallow.

I want to try this out too... so I'm waiting for your results.
 
Thank you!

Yes, i do. Since our colleague mentioned stearic acid coconut oil, ill give you a nice Hot process starter recipe of just Stearic acid + coconut oil.

Why this one? Because its simple and effective, and after making it you'll have a solid start to your shaving soap and will naturally start to experiment with different oils in the future more of your liking. Or not! =P

--
Stearic acid 80%
Coconut oil 20%

Dual lye with 60% KOH and 40% Naoh
Superfat 3%
Lye concentration 30%

After trace is complete and the soap almost cold, i add 10% of total batch weight of Glycerin mixed with the FO /EO.

--

I mentioned before the WSP soap, and obviously i dont know his recipe, but i do think it has to be very near this one.

Good luck, and let me know if i could be of any help with it ;)

Don't you think 20% coconut with 3% SF will be drying to the facial skin?
 
Don't you think 20% coconut with 3% SF will be drying to the facial skin?
Well... Coconut IS drying to the skin, i mentioned it before, and that's why I advice adding glycerin to it. But i do think that it's not THAT bad for a shaving soap to be a tad drying, since unlike a bath soap, we tend to apply lotions/balms/gels/whatever to our face after shaving, and that helps with the moisturizing too.

That being said, i currently sell 4 different shaving soaps, this particular recipe is not in my webstore because i do prefer other formulas, but it is simple and efficient, and you can modify it more to your liking, like substituting some percentage of coconut with grapeseed, castor, canola, argan, macadamia, avocado or which oil you like to add moisturizing, and even replacing coconut altogether with PKO for example.

Good luck with it ;)
 
Thank you!

Yes, i do. Since our colleague mentioned stearic acid coconut oil, ill give you a nice Hot process starter recipe of just Stearic acid + coconut oil.

I'm real new and only use cold process, do you have a recipe using cold process that you can share?
Save
 
I want to try this out too... so I'm waiting for your results.

A bit late to answer this but I'll toss out my two cents. I do not like this recipe at all. The lather felt slick when rubbed between my fingers but it had very poor performance when shaving.

There was no glide and the razor skipped across my skin, leaving a ton of nicks. There was also a very waxy and dry coating left on my skin afterwards which I'm sure is due to the high stearic.

I actually had to use a salt bar to scrub the coating off. I think I'll stick to a high tallow shave soap, its slicker and leaves the skin feeling nice.
 
Thank you!

Yes, i do. Since our colleague mentioned stearic acid coconut oil, ill give you a nice Hot process starter recipe of just Stearic acid + coconut oil.

I'm real new and only use cold process, do you have a recipe using cold process that you can share?

Save

Shave soap with stearic can pretty much only be done hot process. CP doesn't work. It seizes up almost immediately with the stearic.
 

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