Thread: Sadistic Suds (Soaps to Avoid for Those with Sensitive Skin)

Perhaps we need to qualify what "sensitive skin" or "ultra-sensitive skin" is? Is it a recognized medical condition, and so on? All skin is sensitive in essence.

That said, one fragrance of shaving soaps that I cannot tolerate is bay rum. That really sets my face on fire during the shaving process. A pity as I love bay rum as an aftershave and as a scented facial soap in the shower.

I think there is also such a thing as gradual sensitisation. I used Cella for years yet now I notice a burning if I use it.
As far as I know I don't have sensitive skin.

Originally Posted by Pete123

There are a few tings in this post I don't agree with and will share some more detail to explain why.

Consider fragrance for a moment. I make and scent a lot of soap, alcohol based aftershave, pre-shave oil and after shave balm. I also study essential and fragrance oil.

There have been many times the that the base, which are the ingredients excluding fragrance, work well. I'll then work on various scents, keeping the formula and results in a spreadsheet. So, the only variable is the fragrance oil or essential oil. Some burn and some don't. Due to there being only one variable, I'm confident that my assertion is correct.


As an example, I recently developed what I though was the perfect Bay Rum, though it set me on fire. It had several fragrances, such as black pepper and cinnamon, which I suspected to be the problem. I reformulated it, with the only changes being in the fragrance/essential oil and it worked perfectly.

The ability of of scent oils to cause problems is sufficiently known that manufacturers advise when to keep an eye out for this.

Along the same lines of sharing accurate information, consider soap. One of the two key ingredients in soap is lye. One use of lye is to dissolve animal carcasses. It is nasty stuff. One of the basic rules of soap making is to test every batch to ensure all of the lye saponified. Either forgetting this step, or failing to mix the soap sufficiently can lead to lye being in the soap.

Keep in mind that most shaving soap companies are small mom and pop shops - it isn't only the artisans. Many aren't sophisticated enough to have industrial controls like larger companies. Castle Forbes, which I consider the best shaving cream of all, started in 1996 in a converted dairy barn. Not sure if they have moved or not.

Unrelated to the post I quoted, though commenting on what some others in this thread have said, I find many of the artisan's to have awesome soap.

It's interesting that we seem to be relating very similar experiences but drawing rather different conclusions. To be fair, I think I understand what you are saying: when you mix your own soaps (or aftershave treatments) you start with a base that doesn't cause any issues for you but when you add certain fragrance oils to that base it then causes irritation.

In this case there is very little argument that the fragrance oils are the culprit. If this is the case then the next step in the trial process is to tinker with concentrations or find a substitute for some of the components of the fragrance. I am completely in agreement that this can certainly be the origin of some skin sensitivity issues and probably accounts for a decent percentage of issues that some of us deal with.

The other side of that coin comes down to those formulas that begin with a base soap formulation that some of us may be sensitive to. I have no hard evidence that this is the case but I have plenty of circumstantial evidence for it. In the soaps I listed above I mentioned the Black Ship Grooming soaps. In this case all three scents I tried (samples) resulted in the same reaction. So I can either surmise that base formula contains one or more ingredients to which I'm sensitive, there is a fragrance oil common to all three which is the problem or there is a quality control issue that is prevalent across different batches of soap.

The third issue is very possible but if the QC at Black Ship, or any other soap producer, is so poor then I should simply avoid all of their products...done. The second issue is difficult to trace as most producers are, understandably, rather proprietary in regards to their scent formulas. The first issue though is the one that I'm primarily concerned with.

Let's face it, most artisans are choosing their ingredients based on a number of different factors including, but not limited to, their preference in how a soap is produced, how it feels when used, the ability to lather and cost. In many cases I suspect, being artisans without a big budget, that concerns about skin sensitivity aren't high on their priority list. To be clear, I don't think that any of these manufacturers are careless regarding their potential customer but I do believe that the variables that are involved in making a fantastic soap that won't light anyone up are numerous and are probably not universal. Given all of this it is very probable that some producers are using base formulas that will cause sensitivity reactions with some of us that suffer from such issues.

Again, I don't know any of this but I'm merely trying to gather data at this point. As it is a couple of the soaps I've already mentioned share an interesting commonality in that instead of using sodium hydroxide (lye) they use potassium hydroxide. I'm curious as this is an issue for me or not.