The short-hand labels (cleansing, hardness, etc.) for "the numbers" are frankly misleading. The labels contain a grain of truth, but do not remotely tell the whole story. "The numbers" have their place in analyzing a recipe, but I hate their labels because they are often misleading, especially when you are evaluating a specialty soap such as shaving soap, salt bars, high-superfat coconut-oil bars, castile, etc.
Think, for example, of all the newbie soapers who agonize over the fact that castile a zero "cleansing" number, and thus they conclude that castile won't clean!
The "hardness" number is the sum of the average percentages of the lauric, myristic, and stearic fatty acids in the oils. An 89 hardness number is saying about 89% of the fatty acids in the recipe are lauric, myristic, and stearic fatty acids.
These are the fatty acids that are smaller and have a long, straight shape, so they tend to align themselves nicely when the soap solidifies (assuming it's a solid soap). This tidy geometric shape makes these soaps harder, especially initially. In industrial soap making, this is a critical quality -- one does not make money waiting for a soft goopy soap to harden sufficiently to unmold.
This issue is not as important for hand crafted soaps. A low "hardness" number may be a warning that your soap might be softer and more difficult to unmold initially, but it doesn't say much about long-term hardness. Hand crafted soap generally hardens up as time goes on and water evaporates out of the soap, so the hardness number is not as critical as it seemed to me at first. Again, the classic example here is castile -- often very soft in the mold, but brick hard after months of cure.
The "bubble" and "cleansing" numbers are the exact same number with two different labels. The 32 number is telling you that about 32% of the fatty acids are lauric and myristic. These fatty acids are, again, two of the short straight-chain fatty acids. Sodium soaps made from these fatty acids dissolve the easiest in water. More of the lauric and myristic soap will dissolve off the bar when you use the soap to wash (or shave) and these soaps also combine more easily with fats, so these soaps tend to remove more oils from your skin.
Sounds like a cut-and-dried issue, right? Except that curing the soap removes water and stabilizes the geometric structure of the soap, and less water inside the soap and a more regular structure means the soap is less soluble when you use it. Less solubility means less of these soaps get on your skin, and less soap on your skin makes the soap more gentle.
And finally, this recipe gets a big fat zero for the conditioning number. That value is the sum of the oleic, ricinoleic, and linoleic fatty acids. So does this recipe rip one's skin right off? I'd guess you wet shavers can irritate and remove skin far better with your sharp blades than this soap will do.
This soap is a special purpose soap, so the normal rules don't necessarily apply. It needs to make a thick lather to cushion the skin from the blade, and the "conditioning" fatty acids don't create that quality in a soap. I don't know if I would want to shower with shaving soap, but I certainly can appreciate why it has these unusual characteristics.
For conditioning purposes, the other additives that might be included have to be considered -- the extra glycerine, the super fat, any sugars or milks, etc. "The numbers" are silent on these additives which add skin protective qualities. And I would think the cure period will make the soap gentler to the skin as well.
