DIY Homemade Shaving Soap

My local Costco is over 3500kms away. I would be pretty pissed off if they've run out. I'm also not about sure the savings once I include petrol and membership. Maybe I should just pay the extra dollar or two that the Asian supermarket asks.
 
Made an MdC style clone last night for the Adelaide meet up on Sunday. I divided the the soap into two halves and superfatted my half with Macadamia oil before cooling in case the formulation was a bit too drying on the skin. No scent in either one. I will shave with mine today.
 
Hey guys,
I have been meaning to post to this thread but have been out of action for the past week. I have several versions of a cold processed Castile soap curing at the moment, including one that looks more like a gel than a soap after 4 weeks cure time.

In a couple of weeks I am hoping to put together a sample pack, probably have enough for about 6 packs and will be looking for some keen participants to give me feedback.

If you are interested please PM me with address details.
 
Thanks all, I now have a testing team together.

roger

roger said:
Hey guys,

In a couple of weeks I am hoping to put together a sample pack, probably have enough for about 6 packs and will be looking for some keen participants to give me feedback.

If you are interested please PM me with address details.
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Looking forward to seeing some reviews. To be honest I'm skeptical of the OO in the soap but I'm willing to listen to those that use it. You have been doing this a while @roger so I'd be surprised if it was unlatherable.

To be fair, I totally dismissed synthetics at the start and the Plissitane was the brush to change my mind.
 
Monsta_AU said:
To be honest I'm skeptical of the OO in the soap
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To borrow a famous quote "soaps ain't soaps, Sol"
I aim to prove that a good cold processed OO soap can give a really good lather for shaving, however lathering up may take more effort than many other products. Since becoming a reformed shaver I have started to pay more attention to this detail.

As Castile soap is very hard I am experimenting in with a softer soap by using varying amounts of potassium hydroxide in the mix hoping that the softer soap will lather faster, however I still think that the most important component of the soap is the glycerin which needs to fully hydrate once it is liberated from the bar.

My existing shaving soap has 20% castor oil in it which assists in making a faster lather (this mix also make an excellent solid shampoo/conditioner) and I am generally happy with this but find this mix only works well when used in a largish bowl with reasonably hot water and a wait time of 3-5 minutes for the glycerin to fully hydrate.
Still a couple of weeks away from testing but a couple of the mixes are looking very promising.
 
Today @bald as came over to teach me how to make shaving soap.

Base

We went with a base of stearic acid/olive oil/castor oil in a 50/30/20 ratio. Glycerine to 20% of the weight of the oils was added after trace. This is a formula that gives me great shaves.

After all the saponification was complete, the batch was divided into three equal 75 g portions. We did a different scent for each.

Scents

Scent A - tea tree (3 mL), lavender (2 mL), lemon myrtle (1 mL). Scent off the puck is clean with mild Arko overtones. It's incredible how powerful lemon myrtle is. It has a tendency to completely drown out all other scents. The balance here is fairly good though. I think perhaps the lavender could be increased a smidgeon at the expense of the lemon myrtle. Maybe the tea tree should be decreased a bit for more lavender too.

Scent B - cedarwood (2 mL), eucalyptus radiata (2 mL), aniseed (2 mL). Scent off the puck is medicinal. Aniseed is a tad too high and cedarwood seems undetectable, even when actively sniffing for it. In terms of ratio, eucalyptus could come down 0.5 mL and aniseed could come down 1-1.5 mL, whilst cedarwood could take their places by increasing 1.5-2 mL.

Scent C - bay (3 mL), clove bud (0.5), lemon myrtle (2 mL). Once again, the lemon myrtle drowns out its friends. I think an increase of 2 mL of bay and a decrease of 1.5 mL of lemon myrtle would be a good start. Clove sits nicely in the background. I suspect another 'citrus' should be used in place of lemon myrtle.

Lather

As expected, all pucks lather beautifully. Scent A is noticeably harder to load than the others for some reason. All scents are too weak and could be increased from 8% v/w to 12% v/w as an initial try. Once lathered, scent C is the most pleasant, followed by B, followed by A.

Ultimately, the true test will be in shaving with them. I'll let you know how I get on.
 
I've posted my thoughts in the SOTD thread already but I'll repeat them here for posterity.

Scent A - waaaay too potent. Please disregard my suggestion to use 12% v/w. That would be deadly. I think that 2% would be more like it. Apart from potency concerns, the scent combo was not good. Perhaps the components would work more synergistically at a lower dose but I'm scarred for life so I'll move onto other scents methinks.

The soap may have won the battle but I will win the war.
 
@khun_diddy , FWIW the most commonly used Lye Calculator (dunno if @bald as told you what one of these are - essentially an online spreadsheet that does all the number crunching of how much of this to mix with how much of that to make soaps), Soap Calc has a default fragrance/EO % of 3.1%.

Now obviously some folks might like it stronger or weaker - and certain EO's are either stronger or weaker (for example put in 3% Eucalyptus or Tea Tree and it will be WAY too strong). But that % is recommended for CP soaps, who lose a lot of their scent as the scents are added while saponification is still occurring and they then have to cure for many weeks...........so I'm very surprised that your scents were too weak.

As one of the big advantages in doing HP soaps is that they require a lot less scent compounds, which is often 30-50% of the overall costs - so I'd have thought 2% would be about right (depending on the EO's used).

Are you allowing the soap to cool down quite a bit before you add the EO's? As most of them are volatile oils and adding while the soaps are still too hot will see you losing a lot of the EO just like if you were putting it in an oil burner/vapouriser.

- What % superfat did you guys go with? Did you 'select' your SF oil by adding after saponification or was the glycerine the only thing you added post-trace?

- KOH only or some NaOH as well?

- Did you cook it in a double boiler/waterbath or something else?

Interested to know the specifics of what you went with as my new stuff is just asking to be used. ;-)
 
Nick the Knife said:
@khun_diddy , FWIW the most commonly used Lye Calculator (dunno if @bald as told you what one of these are - essentially an online spreadsheet that does all the number crunching of how much of this to mix with how much of that to make soaps), Soap Calc has a default fragrance/EO % of 3.1%.

Now obviously some folks might like it stronger or weaker - and certain EO's are either stronger or weaker (for example put in 3% Eucalyptus or Tea Tree and it will be WAY too strong). But that % is recommended for CP soaps, who lose a lot of their scent as the scents are added while saponification is still occurring and they then have to cure for many weeks...........so I'm very surprised that your scents were too weak.

As one of the big advantages in doing HP soaps is that they require a lot less scent compounds, which is often 30-50% of the overall costs - so I'd have thought 2% would be about right (depending on the EO's used).

Are you allowing the soap to cool down quite a bit before you add the EO's? As most of them are volatile oils and adding while the soaps are still too hot will see you losing a lot of the EO just like if you were putting it in an oil burner/vapouriser.

- What % superfat did you guys go with? Did you 'select' your SF oil by adding after saponification or was the glycerine the only thing you added post-trace?

- KOH only or some NaOH as well?

- Did you cook it in a double boiler/waterbath or something else?

Interested to know the specifics of what you went with as my new stuff is just asking to be used. ;-)
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The soap was pretty cool when we added the scents. Perhaps it was even a little too cool and the EO consequently was not properly mixed in.

We superfatted at 5% but didn't select a particular oil to superfat with. Glycerine was the only thing added post trace (except for EO). Ultimately, I think I'll be adding lanolin post-trace too and maybe that means glycerine can be brought down from 20% to 15%.

These soaps were a 50/50 NaOH/KOH mix. That seems to give a very favourable consistency.

The soap was cooked in a Pyrex jug in a crockpot.
 
Thanks for the reply mate. That all sounds really well done. The only thing I'd tweak would be selecting the oil or portion of the oil that you WANT to have unsaponified and reserving that to add to the mix POST-trace. This is one of the main benefits of HP soap, as with CP you basically get a lil of every oil unsaponified which is far from ideal as lets face it who wants unsaponified tallow or palm oil on their face. But HP allows you to custom pick the oil you want to have left intact....thus you can pick one to suit exactly what you're doing might want more moisturising (macadamia, shea butter) or slickness (olive) - anyway just an idea but you're getting very good results as is so I'll be watching your progress with great interest. (y)
 
Nick the Knife said:
Thanks for the reply mate. That all sounds really well done. The only thing I'd tweak would be selecting the oil or portion of the oil that you WANT to have unsaponified and reserving that to add to the mix POST-trace. This is one of the main benefits of HP soap, as with CP you basically get a lil of every oil unsaponified which is far from ideal as lets face it who wants unsaponified tallow or palm oil on their face. But HP allows you to custom pick the oil you want to have left intact....thus you can pick one to suit exactly what you're doing might want more moisturising (macadamia, shea butter) or slickness (olive) - anyway just an idea but you're getting very good results as is so I'll be watching your progress with great interest. (y)
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Interesting Nick. I've been thinking today that I could put a certain number of drops of EO into some carrier oil such as almond oil or olive oil and then use that carrier oil as my superfat. That way it would be quite easy to control the dose of EO. Honestly, after last night's experience I'm thinking 'drops' not 'mL' as far as EO goes. I'm still reeling from the stench.
 
khun_diddy said:
Interesting Nick. I've been thinking today that I could put a certain number of drops of EO into some carrier oil such as almond oil or olive oil and then use that carrier oil as my superfat. That way it would be quite easy to control the dose of EO. Honestly, after last night's experience I'm thinking 'drops' not 'mL' as far as EO goes. I'm still reeling from the stench.
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Thats not a bad idea - atleast just to help incorporate both of these elements into your freshly saponified soap.

FWIW try and get away from ml or drops and PURELY work by weight. Get yourself a pair of scales that are accurate to 1/100th of a gram and that'll allow you to be far more accurate. You can get 500g versions for as little as $5-7 delivered and you can either weigh what you're putting it into OR what I normally do when measuring only very small amounts is weigh what you're taking it out from e.g the EO bottle, tare it and you're able to see what you're removing. Weight is the way to go....and start by adding just small overall %'s - as with HP soap you can often warm them back up in the microwave and incorporate a lil more EO or SF oil if needed (though it's a somewhat iffy practice).

All sounds pretty good though.
 
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