Reading labels and guessing ingredient percentages

Anyone here good at reading labels and guessing the percentages of each ingredient? I have a shaving soap I love and would like to make one that is close to it with some added modifications to make it my own and eventually make it better if possible.
I have a very sensitive neck area after I shave and I can only use the best to almost completely eliminate the problem. Even very good shave soap doesn't do a great job, so I really need to make something special for my needs.

You got some good advice on the badger and blade forum, especially the link to the silver fox blog which is the distilled version of the legendary Songwind thread on here, both of which you should study. Did you try the silver fox recipe? What is the actual list of ingredients in this favourite soap of yours, and what is the soap?

I have read it and have not made the recipe on the silver fox website yet. It's pretty far off from the recipe im wanting to make, so I haven't messed with it yet. That recipe is closer to another shaving soap I have that is not as good, still decent, but not great. I'm sure they are different, but I'm pretty focused on the one that is great right now and if all fails trying to recreate it, then I will venture into the more recommended paths on creating a shave soap.
I've not read the songwind thread, but I will look for it and read it.

The ingredient list on the shave soap I'm trying to recreate is:
saponified tallow (beef) and stearic acid; vegetable glycerin; saponified kokum butter, avocado oil, and shea butter; lanolin, fragrance and/or essential oil(s); saponified coconut oil; kaolin clay, vitamin E.

By seeing where the Glycerin is on the list, I'm thinking the oils below it might be in the 1 to 2 % range?
Lanolin is just above fragrance, so I'm thinking somewhere in the 1oz range? The scent is pretty strong, but very pleasant and natural smelling FO.
Tallow and Stearic I'm not sure about. Maybe 45 40, but really have no idea.

Out of respect for the maker, I would rather not list the name of the soap since I'm trying to get in the General range of the makers product recipe.

Fragrances tend to max out at 10% - in terms of what is considered skin safe. If you know for sure what the fragrance/EO is then you can narrow the potential range.

I've only skimmed through the songwind thread but I remember there were specifics on glycerin and steric usage

I will read through that thread and see if I can get a better idea on proper % range on some ingredients.

I highly suggest reading the Songwind thread to at least get an idea where to start. You can always play with ingredients once you understand the process behind it.

I take it you're trying to dupe this? http://mikesnaturalsoaps.com/Shaving Bars.html

DeeAnna said:

I take it you're trying to dupe this? http://mikesnaturalsoaps.com/Shaving Bars.html

Click to expand...

Yes.

Nice to know -- there's really no point in being cagey. You're clearly wanting to create a copycat recipe, so you might as well be really honest and 'fess up about whose product you want to replicate.

I used to check for plagiarism in my students' term paper by running suspicious phrases through Google. You copied and pasted the ingredients list directly from the maker's website, so it wasn't hard to figure this out.

I find it kind of fun to try to dissect recipes, so I'll take a stab at it. I'll colour code the additives vs. the core recipe.

distilled water - 25% lye concentration (80% KOH / 20% NaOH)
saponified tallow - 45%
stearic acid - 40%
vegetable glycerin (additive)- 15% of oil weight
saponified kokum butter - 6%
saponified avocado oil - 3%
saponified shea butter - 3%
lanolin (additive) - 3%
fragrance and/or essential oil(s) - 3%
saponified coconut oil - 3%
kaolin clay (additive) - .5 tsp PPO
vitamin E (additive) - .01% PPO

The main players are going to be the tallow and stearic acid, with stearic providing that classic rich foamy lather. I'd reserve some of those rich butters to use as a 5% superfat after the cook.

For additives, they have lanolin, fragrance, clay and vitamin E. Vitamin E is mainly an antioxidant. Clay can add a bit of slip, but many shavers do not like clay in their shaving soap as it can dull the blade. So that's definitely optional.

Anyway... that's my attempt. Who knows how close I got!

Thank you very much for writing all that out for me, I really appreciate it.
I did a bit of research and used what you wrote as my guide for being in the general range on what it might be. Im using Palm instead of Tallow, so I had to make a few adjustments, but I was able to come up with a recipe to try out. Well, almost there. Just have a couple more thing I need to calculate before I print it out and make a batch.
Will post the results and some pictures if it turns out.