DeeAnna's Milk in Soap Information

[The Efficacious Gentleman]

A good soap will help, but the right razor will, too. I always had a lot of weepers (not cuts, exactly, but places where blood would seep out a little) with the mach 3 and similar cartridges. But with a safety razor and even more so with a cutthroat I get none at all.

With a multiple blade razor, the second blade has less lather than the first, and the third one less than the second and so on. I would never do another pass without reapplying lather, but that is what you do with cartridge systems. And that's not great for the skin

 

[Phlier]

DH gets eczema every time he shaves.
He now uses an electric razor that leaves the fashionable stubble look and gets no eczema. I wonder if a good shaving soap will help? He’s tried just about every commercial one available.

You might want to get him some samples of some of the better artisan soaps. Since you are in Australia, you might want to consider the artisan Australia Private Reserve. While I haven't tried their products personally, they are highly regarded on the shaving forums.

 

[Phlier]

A good soap will help, but the right razor will, too. I always had a lot of weepers (not cuts, exactly, but places where blood would seep out a little) with the mach 3 and similar cartridges. But with a safety razor and even more so with a cutthroat I get none at all.

With a multiple blade razor, the second blade has less lather than the first, and the third one less than the second and so on. I would never do another pass without reapplying lather, but that is what you do with cartridge systems. And that's not great for the skin

Yes, equipment counts a lot. I left out *a lot* of the specifics of getting a good wet shave, and tried to focus on just one product... soap. I'm afraid if I included all the necessary information regarding *all* of the things necessary, it would have resulted in such a long post, no one would ever read it all. I also left out all the information about re-applying product between passes, the importance of good technique, etc. Just too much to get into on a forum that centers around soap making.

I just tried to generalize it enough for a soap forum.

 

[The Efficacious Gentleman]

There is that sort of generalisation and much much more in the Songwind shaving soap thread - it's a long one, but well worth the time if you are interested in shaving soaps and/or shaving

Edited to add, my first post was more aimed at pj looking for a solution for DH rather than a critique of your post

 

[Phlier]

There is that sort of generalisation and much much more in the Songwind shaving soap thread - it's a long one, but well worth the time if you are interested in shaving soaps and/or shaving

Edited to add, my first post was more aimed at pj looking for a solution for DH rather than a critique of your post

I've read that thread from post one all the way to the end. Took me two weeks.

I've been making soap since the first of February, and have made soap literally every day since. My record is seven batches in one day. I make batches that are 100 grams total oils. I have extremely accurate scales for small batches like this. I'll have to check my records, but I'm up to somewhere around 70+ revisions to my first recipe. I've named them, rather than number them, so I'll actually have to count. It takes me less than an hour per batch to cook, as I stick blend the batch from start to finish.

 

[The Efficacious Gentleman]

Good for you, I think.

Again, you said that you wrote a generalisation for people and had to exclude certain things, I pointed out that the information is already here plus parts that you had to miss out.

Feel free to take everything that I post as an attack, but it really isn't meant that way at all.

 

[Phlier]

Good for you, I think.

Again, you said that you wrote a generalisation for people and had to exclude certain things, I pointed out that the information is already here plus parts that you had to miss out.

Feel free to take everything that I post as an attack, but it really isn't meant that way at all.

Oh, I didn't take it that way at all! My apologies if I came across that way. I've read many of your posts here, and learned a lot from them.

 

[SoaperForLife]

Just an aside and not to start an argument, some of the folks on Badger and Blade don't necessarily agree with you Phlier. https://www.badgerandblade.com/forum/threads/milk-in-shaving-soaps.547335/

 

[Phlier]

Just an aside and not to start an argument, some of the folks on Badger and Blade don't necessarily agree with you Phlier. https://www.badgerandblade.com/forum/threads/milk-in-shaving-soaps.547335/

I've been on Badger & Blade since 2008. You ask 10 different guys a question there, and you'll get 15 different answers. That's just one thread, on one shave forum. There are many, many others. You just can't find them by searching on milk. The problem is that you're still locked into the "Milk" mentality. WE DON'T CARE ABOUT MILK! We care about the performance of any given base. You're not going to find much information (just one thread, by the look of it) by searching on milk. You must search for the various artisans, and/or the artisan's base names.

It drives the point home that guys don't look at what is in the soap. Every top artisan ( Grooming Dept, Barrister & Mann, Wholly Kaw) is using one or more milks. There are also a lot of good bases that don't include milk (Grooming Dept's Duck Fat comes to mind), but the top end bases (Grooming Dept's "Lusso") do have milk. It isn't exactly fair to say that we don't look at what's in the soap, we do, but we don't go "OMG, it's got milk in it! That's going to be amazing!" We look at the base, and how it works.

Typically, B&B discusses the product itself, not the ingredients. You'll have more luck searching for Wholly Kaw, then looking at the bases that are discussed, rather than just searching for milk. If you look up the threads on Wholly Kaw's "Buffla" base (which has donkey and water buffalo milks in it), you'll find a ton of threads on how amazing that soap base is. Same with Grooming Dept "Lusso" base. Search for the bases, not for milk.

https://www.badgerandblade.com/forum/threads/wholly-kaw-donkey-milk-soaps.518289/
https://www.badgerandblade.com/foru...dm-man-from-mayfair-shave-soap-review.541688/
https://www.badgerandblade.com/forum/threads/wholly-kaw-fans.560031/
https://www.badgerandblade.com/forum/threads/wholly-kaw-pashas-pride.552737/
https://www.badgerandblade.com/forum/threads/wholly-kaw-king-of-bourbon.554676/
https://www.badgerandblade.com/forum/threads/grooming-dept.563675/
https://www.badgerandblade.com/forum/threads/grooming-dept-veritas-liquid.561554/
https://www.badgerandblade.com/forum/threads/grooming-dept-club.555886/page-3
https://www.badgerandblade.com/forum/threads/todays-grooming-dept-releases.563753/
This next one is one of the best. Scroll down to the review summary post. Look at the Grade A+ section of the list: https://www.badgerandblade.com/forum/threads/review-of-70-soaps.527820/page-24
I could fill up an entire page of links to B&B threads where guys discuss the various soap bases that happen to have milk in them. I'll stop here, as I think that's enough to make the point.

So quite to the contrary, I'd say the guys on B&B do agree quite heartily with me.

Anyway, I'm done here. All I've gotten is negativity, closed mindedness and arguments. Happy soaping.

 

[LBussy]

I'm going to pull the curtain of "Things Women Don't Know About Men's Grooming"

Are you aware that we are watching and we can have your Man Card revoked at the mere flick of a finger!?

Seriously though .... let me postulate that it’s not the milk that creates the difference, but the skill of the soaper?

I’ve been shaving with a straight for a number of years (would have to go look for my log on B&B to figure out how long) and making my own soap for almost that long. The soap absolutely makes all the difference but I’ve detected no significant difference between batches using milk and not.

Now granted, my initial assertion may come back to haunt me here - I am nowhere near as experienced with milk as I am without, but I do a three-pass shave every weekday so I at least qualify as an experienced shaver.

Don’t let me stand in the way of your quest however. I got to where I’m happy by experimenting. You should do the same.

- Lee

[ETA - There’s also a marketing effect here. Milk has always sounded luxurious. “Milk bath”? If you were going to make your best and make it stand out, milk is a good marketing item. Also, the ladies here are not negative but some of the best people I’ve been blessed to be around. Maybe you should give them a chance and concede that they may be the experienced soapers you seek. ]