Thread: Standing on the shoulders of giants......

So I have been curious as to how to make shaving soap, specifically a good soft "Italian" soap or cream. I decided to pursue this a little a cooked up a batch of soap based off of a thread on the Shave My Face forum. Didn't turn out as soft as I wanted, but a great soap (and I now have enough shaving soap to last me a good many years). Fast forward a few weeks and I decided to give it another go....

Decided to try 1/2 pound batches. This was done for a few reasons: only need so much soap on hand, have many recipes/variations I want to try, any smaller and it becomes very difficult to accurately measure the oils and lye. When making batches this small, make sure you measure the ingredients in grams, using ounce measures can make you end up with a soap that is still caustic after cooking (guess how I know...).

I measured out my 4 recipes the night before:

I chose these little crock pots because they are just big enough to make a 1/2 pound batch. I had to stir down two batches when I added the lye, but they were fine besides that. BTW, Walmart sells em for $9.99

Assembled my tools the morning of battle:

Notice the Safety Goggles. Lye is nothing to take lightly.

This is all of them after about 1hr cooking. Takes about 3 hrs to totally saponify and use up the Lye.


These are all super fatted to 7%. The "norm" is 5% but I wanted a little room for error do to the very small batches I was making. Most soapers make 5+ pound batches, so they can be off a few grams or even ounces in their measurements and still be ok.

Soap 2A is a modification of the Lye mixture of my previous batch for a softer soap. Made up of lard, coconut, castor, stearic acid, and a dab of lanolin
3A is a MdC clone and is made up of coconut oil and stearic acid. this is super fatted after cooking with glycerin.
1A Tallow, Caster, Coconut, and stearic
1B is a mod of 1A with Tallow, Castor, Palm, and stearic

I will let you know how it goes, wish me luck!

After 3 hrs cooking I did a go-no go test on the ph. I have a solution called 1% Phenolphthalein. You put a drop of it on some of your cooled down soap and if does NOT turn pink, then you are around 9.5 ph ( fairly neutral). After 3 hrs a did a swab of each crock pot and got the following..

viola! Houston, we have lift-off!

Gave them a good stir and started dolling them out into portions for testing and storage. Here is the result.



Figure I will divvy them into separate Ziploc bags and freeze the ones not being used. That should prevent any spoilage issues I think.... I will try a lather test with each of them later. More to come.

Just to make it clear, I am not claiming I came up with any of this on my own. The title of the thread is "Standing on the shoulders of giants", a phrase that was used in the original thread on SMF to communicate that what I have been able to do is only because other people were gracious enough to share their knowledge, trials, and tribulations. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, ask away or shoot me a pm.

Looks great! I'd like to get into this some day, but maybe not while I have an infant crawling around the house.

So did some lather tests today. Soaked brush in water for 15 minutes and had a slight layer of water soaking on soap as well. This is my normal routine while I take a shower in the morning. I know that all soap behave differently and it can take awhile to dial them in, but to keep things on an equal footing I followed the same lathering routine for each.

Squeeze out brush, empty water from soap.
Load brush for 30 seconds.
Work brush in bowl for 30 seconds.
Apply drizzle of water to brush.
Repeat as needed.

The brush used was my very first brush from a VanderHagen shaving kit. Not an epic brush, but no suprises.
First pic is afeter 3 cycles, second pic is after a 15 minute wait period.

First test was batch 3A, the MdC clone.
Lathered VERY easy. Could not get a read on how soft it was as it was "poured" into a shave mug. 100% KOH. Started getting good lather on the first lathering cycle. More than enough for 3+ passes.


Initial loading of brush and after 15 minutes. Resulted in a very slick lather. Cant' wait to try this tommorow.

Next up was batch 2A trail #2
Very soft and moldable soap. Was made with 100% KOH. Lathered well. Did 4x to see if it would perk up a bit, helped but not as much as hoped.



Next was batch 1A. Made a lather fairly quick. 70% KOH / 30% NaOH. Very soft and moldable soap. Seemed a bit thirstier. Lather exploded at 2nd cycle but did a 3rd just to be consistant.


Lastly was batch 1B. lLathered easily. 70% KOH / 30% NaOH. Very soft and moldable soap. Did 3 lather cycles. Overflwoing lather at end of 2nd cycle and all of third cycle. May be a tad bit "fluffier"


All in all, fairly pleased with this experiment so far. Need to record my initial thoughts and results for the next trials (yes, there will be more ). Now to get shaving with these over the next month and see how they hold up.

Thanks for the thread Matt. Both interesting and informative

I'll be interested to hear your thoughts after you've had a chance to cut some of it.

very cool, you make at home soap production look too easy!
As it appears that you've got the soap performance dialed in, have you given thought to adding EOs for scent?

I figure I will play around with a few more formulations and tweaks on them.... say another month or two. I have been re-reading all of the info I have and searching out more. Once I have a few different formulations down pretty well I will start looking at EOs and scenting. I figure slow and steady will work well. Just need to keep LOTS of notes.

@OCD: Tried the MdC clone today. I have never tried MdC so have no comparison. Didn't like it. It worked fairly well to shave with, but the lather seemed too ... fluffy. Also dried my skin out after the shave. Had to apply some lotion to hydrate it. That being said, I have reviewed the threads I got the recipe from and it seems I may have miscalculated somewhere. I will record the results and move on to the next batch. I may try to rebatch this one and try to make a shower soap out of it. No need for it to go to waste.

I have also looked at some of the info out there on cream soaps. That may be an experiment for another day

TwistedOak: As you can see from the prior post, I have the basics down, but I am in no way proficient...yet.

I may get brave in the future and see how people like the recipes, but I don't see that happening for a bit.