Thread: Marvy shaving soap

Has anyone gotten this soap to work?

I bought 4 pucks on ebay for $12-$13 with shipping, which seemed a good price for a "name" brand.

Unfortunately the soap foams heavily, and dissipates before your eyes. It foams so much it overflows the soap cup and flies off the brush.

Apparently it is too high moisture with too much surfactant action, so I added 1/2 oz sesame oil to the 2.25 oz puck and let it sink in. It made the result more like lather, but it's still too short-lived. I've added another 1/2 oz oil, and I'll see how this works tomorrow.

Personally..I found GodRej soaps to be very easily lathering from Men's Shaving, Grooming, Skin and Hair Care - West Coast Shaving $5 plus few bucks for shipping..I am almost done with 25% of it.(cut into quarter pieces)after months of using it.

pcdad

Originally Posted by Alethephant

Has anyone gotten this soap to work?

I bought 4 pucks on ebay for $12-$13 with shipping, which seemed a good price for a "name" brand.

Unfortunately the soap foams heavily, and dissipates before your eyes. It foams so much it overflows the soap cup and flies off the brush.

Apparently it is too high moisture with too much surfactant action, so I added 1/2 oz sesame oil to the 2.25 oz puck and let it sink in. It made the result more like lather, but it's still too short-lived. I've added another 1/2 oz oil, and I'll see how this works tomorrow.

Never heard of the stuff, sorry.

I have a love/hate relationship with it. I wish it were love/love as The Marvy Co. is right here in the city where I live. I find it thin but still having fine lubricity - generally.

I got mine from Bruce. I think it works okay. No high drama or anything, just a good workaday soap. I have better luck when the brush is shaken to reduce the excess water.

I've continued to try to solve the excessive foaming and short-lived lather problem.

Multiple dollops of oil (total 15-30 ml on a 2.5 oz cake) have reduced the excessive foaming. It now looks creamy when it goes on.

However by the time I set the brush down and pick up the razor, the lather has dissipated and the skin shows through.

I don't think this soap is salvageable.

Perhaps it's not really Marvy and is just a knock-off.

In any event, I think I'll move on at this point and write off the other 3 cakes.

Thanks for all your help.

Burt's Bees Shea Butter foot cream plus oil finally did the trick.

This combination finally overpowered the foaming surfactants of the Marvy soap cake and converted it into a usable, reasonable lasting lather.

I would say, however, in my opinion, that even after this it was not on parity with a cheap, good soap, such as Colgate.

For G-d's sake, man, get yourself some J.B. Williams... sheesh! You're a cheap bastard, alright, I'll give you that much!

But seriously, Williams has got to be better than Marvy. I have both. I went to the store on St. Clair. Got a sample size lucky tiger's "Aspen Aroma." Yay. Also have a puck of Marvy's. It will do as the pre-cursor to the actual shave. It will be a puck of shave soap relegated to the pre-shave routine, the moist/hot towel with soap. That's it. I wouldn't even use it with a double-edged safety razor. The lubrication is there, but the cushion... yeah, you could use it... but it's more of a challenge than a decent soap. Skip this product, newbs.

As a final, final note, I'm using the other 3 pucks of Marvy's as hand/face soap now. They work really great for this. Their excess foaminess is wonderful for removing dirt from hands.

I suspect this is just normal soap poured into shaving puck size molds, which explains the results. I think a lot of custom soap makers do this. (I.e., the soap is not special for shaving.)