How does my shaving soap recipe look?

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PatrickH

The Perfectionist
Joined
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Location
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My first recipe I'm trying to create is shaving soap and was hoping some experienced shave soap makers could look at my recipe and tell me what you think.
Spent a few hours playing with the soapcalc and this is what I got.
I plan on adding some extra glycerine, clay and maybe a preservative of some kind if needed?
Also using dual Lye.
Not sure if I should do a 3% SF and add 2% SF after Saponafacation or what, but this is what I got so far in the picture below.
I'm not 100% sure what the prime numbers would be on the soap calc, especially when adding extras not listed in the calc, but I'm pretty sure I'm in the right ball park?

Screenshot_20170819-152251.jpg
 
I would lower the coco butter and increase the coconut. You need more lather, the butters will cut down the lather too much.

My shave recipe is really simple. I use only KOH but you can use any combo of NaOH and KOH you want, depends on how hard you want the finished product.

Tallow (you could use palm but tallow is better) 55%
Stearic acid 20%
coconut oil 10%
castor 10%
coco butter 5% (added after the cook for SF)

This make a decent, stable and slick lather.
 
Obsidian's suggestions are good, but my recipe is

50% stearic acid
30% tallow (or lard, either works)
10% Coconut oil
5% Cocoa butter
5% lanolin.

5% superfat, 60% KOH, 2 gr tetrasodium EDTA per pound

hold half the cocoa butter and lanolin til after the cook.

You want at least 50% stearic acid in the fatty acids profile. I don't like castor in my shave soap, but if you do don't add coconut oil, they both do much the same thing for shaving soap I think.

I know mine makes wonderful and very long lasting shave soap, been using it exclusively for a couple months now.
 
Ok, thank you. I greatly appreciate the info from both of you.
I will make some adjustments and see what that gives me.
My original plan was to use Tallow, but it cost 3 times more then the Palm oil unless I make it myself.
Once I find a good recipe to where I don't need any further adjustments, I may try making for own Tallow, but haven't looked at all the fine details on making Tallow in a quality way.
 
I did a bit more reading and came up with this recipe. I will lower the super fat % to 2 for the cook and add another 2% after the cook with 2 special oils/butters.
My goal really is to make the best shaving soap possible, so I'm not trying to make just a "shaving soap". Makes things a bit more difficult, but I'm feeling the effort will be rewarding if it goes good. We will see how the first batch turns out and go from there. :)
I will fine tune this recipe, but for now I just wanted to get in the General range of ingredients and run it by people here who have more experience then me on shaving soaps.
So what do you think of this recipe? Could it work?

Screenshot_20170822-003618.jpg
 
That should work, but it's a bit high on oleic, which may result in undesirable lather.

There is no one "perfect" shaving soap, there are a lot of ways to get to what you want.

And I would make smaller batches -- I'm finding that really good shaving soaps make huge amounts of very nice lather with very small amounts of soap -- a pound of good shaving soap will probably last five years in daily use. You will have mountains of soap in short order! Not that lots of soap is a bad thing (or I would be in serious trouble myself), but it's something to think of.

I don't think you will notice "exotic" oils at less than 5% except as superfat added after the cook -- only non-saponifiable constituents are still around after the lye converts the oils to fatty acid salts.

I would ditch the palm kernal oil and castor oil and raise the Stearic to 50% and the coconut to 10 or 15% -- that will give you a little boost in the stearic/palmitic fatty acids and retain the ease of lathering. Lanolin is essentially non-saponifiable, add it whenever you want (it's a wax, not an oil) and retain some shea and cocoa butter for the superfat.

My mother is delighted with the soap I made for her with cocoa and shea as superfat, she's been having issues with dry itchy skin for the last couple years, and with those two as superfat she's getting a lot of relief. Should cover up any drying effect from the coconut.

Have fun with it -- and when you get the recipe right, you can dive into the rabbit hole of scents....

Oh, almost forgot -- you can get a steady supply of tallow by buying cheaper grades of ground beef for things like chili -- cook the fat out on low heat (don't brown the meat, just sorta steam out the water) and collect the fat. You can then brown the meat properly by retaining a bit of the fat, gives you lower fat in the food and nice tallow for soap. You will need to render it a couple of times with equal volumes of water with some baking soda to neutralized the acids and remove any protein, this also removed the hamburger off the grill scent. Cheap and easy, especially for shaving soap were you won't use much.
 
Hi Patrick -

psfred is correct... there's no "perfect" shaving soap or any soap for that matter. Much like you I'm a perfectionist as well and strive for it with just about everything I do. I think you will find out really quickly that when it comes to soaping... perfection doesn't exist but it's what we are all striving for.

My advice is to gain wisdom through experience and go ahead and just create a basic shaving soap. You will learn so much and it will give you new insight on the entire process... you can easily overthink a soap recipe and then it turns into a chore and that's no fun at all.
 
I also use 60-75% KOH or all KOH depending on the shaving soap recipe. The KOH makes a soap that is more soluble and easier to work with a shaving brush for lathering. 100% NaOH will work as well, but will require more work to initially work up the lather once moistened. YMMV...
 
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