Thread: Soaps and cremes ingredient question

I ask myself this question many times and did not find correct answer, so what you think which ingredient-s in cream or soap softenes the beard most?

Personally I dont think its any one ingredient that softens the beard, I think its the combination of good quality soap and hot water that does it. The soap provides slickness so the razor glides easily as well.

No doubt that lather contributes to beard preparation. Soaps and creams often have ingredients to specifically soften the beard. For instance, some have oils, waxes and even silicones that soften the whiskers, among other things they do. Some contain natural or man made additives that help. However, water is perhaps the most important of all.

Water penetrates hair and skin helping the process. Now, the soap helps by acting as a wetting agent (surfactant). There is a thread about a barber claiming that a vigorous massage would help prep your beard. Although this is not wrong per se, soapy water would have been much more effective. Without trying to be too technical, water diffuses pretty fast through skin or hair, there is no massage in the world that could speed this up because it happens extremely fast (microseconds). The only thing that the massage could do is to spread the water around to make it available everywhere on the skin and hair surface. This is accomplished much better and faster by using a wetting agent (soap) to lower the surface tension. Chemistry helping barbers chop whiskers more efficiently ;-).

Al raz.

The soap serves several purposes:

First, it reduces the surface tension of water allowing it to better wet your skin and beard.

Secondly, the lather actually holds moisture against your skin and beard, keeping them from drying out.

It is the water that provides most of the softening, but , soaps are by their very nature slightly alkaline (pH typically about 9) and this helps in the softening process.

I know one ingredient that softens is Lanolin. Commonly found in Mitchells Wool Fat....

I agree it's the hot water that does the most softening. Everything else is just icing on the cake.