In this article, I will be giving instructions of how to make shaving soap. Shaving soap is a special topic in the field of soap making. As is the case with hand-crafted bar soap, shaving soap can be cottage industry. If you do a quick online search, you will find that there are several small producers of shaving soap. You will also see that many small producers are fetching $20 and more for a small packaged cake of a few ounces. Some artisans make bar soap and shave soap. Some seem to specialize in shave soap only.
Why so expensive? I believe the high price is perhaps mostly due to the way shaving soap is perceived. Most men do not use a shaving brush; they used canned shaving cream. So, “hot shave” soap, as it is called, is seen as something used by the wealthy or as a luxury item. Often, not-so-wealthy people buy luxury items as a way to pamper themselves and to feel good about themselves. Considering this, an average income person might reasonably be expected to purchase $20 container of shaving soap just to feel a little richer. It is certainly easier to manage that buying a luxury car!
In addition to the luxury factor, small producers must charge more for shaving soap because it is more expensive to produce than a bar of soap. And more difficult! If you have had any success making bar soap, good for you! But there are some curve balls involved in making shaving soap correctly.
A Special Soap with Special Demands
To make a a good shave soap, you really have to do it RIGHT. Since it is a luxury item, you can’t go half way or just sort of get it. The product has to be of high quality and perform well. So, what does that mean? As I see it, there are four necessary components in a good shave soap:
- It must have a big stable lather.
- The lather needs to have a good lubricating quality.
- It must have good skin conditioning qualities.
- The scent should be special.
Let’s consider these components one at a time.
Lather
If you have ever made soap, you should know that accomplishing a good lather is a little tricky. However, the expectation with shaving soap is not just a good lather, but a stable lather; that is, a big lather that looks like foam and holds its shape. There is only one ingredient I know of that produces stable lather and that is Stearic Acid. Stearic acid is found in tallow (beef fat) and in some plants.
Because Tallow contains stearic acid, it is possible to make a shave soap with tallow. However, that may not be the preferred choice for a couple reason. Consider, for example, that tallow will contain other materials besides stearic acid and this may affect the outcome of the stable lather you are striving for. But perhaps just as important, many people are turned off by the presence of animal product ingredients. Fortunately, thanks to the miracle of modern chemistry, it is possible to buy pure Stearic acid that has been derived from plants or Tallow. Stearic acid derived from Tallow is less expensive than that derived from vegetable. Although the two types of Stearic acid are more or less indistinguishable, the vegetable-based material will probably make your product a little more marketable. In any case, Stearic acid will be the main fatty acid ingredient in your shave soap and it is more expensive than your average base oil.
Lubricating Quality
So that the razor glides on the skin, it is necessary to create good lubrication in your shave soap. I have seen two ways to do this. One is to use silk enzymes. I have seen a number of soap bar recipes that include silk enzymes. Soap makers use it because it gives the soap a slippery feel. I have not it yet because it is a little pricey.
The second option, which I have tried, is to add a little Bentonite. Bentonite is a clay. In its dried form, it is light and powdery. When wet, it is very slippery. If you’ve ever taken a pottery class, you have felt it. It is that slick, slimy substance referred to as “slip.”
Skin Conditioning Properties
There are a good number of materials you can choose from to make your soap conditioning for skin . Keep in mind, however, that skin conditioning ingredients can inhibit the success of your lather. For example, while being a great skin conditioner, Olive Oil will contribute nothing to lather. In short, you have to choose wisely. You should probably choose a mix from among butters and base oils. Some good butters to choose from include:
- Cocoa Butter
- Shea Butter
- Mango butter
- Kokum Butter
These are the usual go-to, preferred butters people turn to create skin care products. But butters can be made from any good skin conditioning oil. Hence, you may also find butters made from olive oil, jojoba oil, avocado oil, sunflower oil and many others. I think the butters listed above would serve best though.
Some good skin conditioning oils you can choose from include: Olive oil, Sweet Almond oil, Jojoba oil, Avocado oil, and Argan oil. In addition to these, you may also want to include a 4-10% portion of Castor oil to support the lather.
Developing a Scent
When it comes to scent, there are 2 ways to go: you either use real essential oils (EO) or you use synthetic fragrance oils (FO). If you look at what is on the market, there are both kinds. There are pros and cons to both choices (EO or FO), and your choice will probably depend on what you are trying to achieve. One of the pros of using essential oils is that they ARE essential oils; which is to say they are often the preferred choice. People view essential oils as more natural and genuine. There is, afterall, the whole industry of Aromatherapy which claims that essential oils can have actual health benefits, in addition to benefitting mood. (Thank you, Aromatherapy industry for helping out the small soap industry!) In terms of their scent value, essential oils are special; they do have depth and subtlety not usually found in synthetics. EOs have 2 main downsides. One is that they can be expensive; sometimes prohibitively so. The second pitfall is that these scents can be fragile or shortlived. Sometimes, when used in a soap, an EO scent gets lost in the soap and doesn’t come through strongly enough. In other cases, a soap may smell great when it is first made, but after a few months the smell has completely faded away.
If you choose to go with essential oils, you can go with either a single essential oil or, more likely, with a blend of a few oils. If you look around enough online, you can find recipes for blends. Be skeptical, though. You might take these as a suggestion or starting point, but I doubt many people would share their favorite recipe online.
The problems of essential oils (price and fragility) are completely overcome with Fragrance Oils (FOs). FOs provide strong and reliable scent. They do not have the subtlety of EOs. Consider however, that most people are exposed to synthetic smells several times a day and very rarely smell EOs. Some people will actually prefer FOs because it is what they are used to. Another advantage of FOs is that they are often more economical to use than EOs. Many shave soap producers offer “Bay Rum” scented shave soap. In all cases, these are undoubtedly FO scented products. Bay Rum EO is simply way too expensive to use in a soap.
Putting Together a Recipe
To summarize, then, our shave soap recipe will call for a large proportion of Stearic Acid, a couple of the classic butters, a few oils and a small portion of Castor oil. And somewhere in the process you will be adding a scent. Unfortunately, nobody is going to freely give you their favorite shave soap recipe. These recipes are closely guarded secrets!
So, my advice is follow your intuition and do a lot of testing and experimenting. Try things out until you get a result you like. Below, I will present an example of a sample recipe and the procedure you should use. Keep in mind I am not presenting this as a finalized recipe I stand by. It is a starting point. If something in this recipe looks odd to you, feel free to adjust it to your liking.
Items You Will Need
- digital scale
- slow cooker (crock pot)
- Stainless steel stick blender
- plastic or glass containers
- silicone kitchen spatulas
- plastic wrap (Stretch-Tite is the best brand)
- Sodium Hydroxide
- Potassium Hydroxide
- Infra-red thermometer
- Stainless steel whisk
- distilled water
- base oils and Stearic Acid
- butters
- EOs or FOs
- safety wear: long sleeves, rubber or nitrile gloves, eye wear
- vinegar
- Bentonite
- Aloe Vera (optional)
- Glycerine (optional)
Safety Precautions
Please see the Safety Precautions that appear in the article on Hand-Crafted Soap.
(Tentative) Recipe
30% Stearic Acid
20% Coconut Oil
5% Castor Oil
5% Cocoa Butter
5% Shea Butter
10% Sweet Almond Oil
10% Avocado Oil
10% Palm Oil
5% Argan Oil
There are a couple ways to use this recipe. The simplest way to start is to use grams as your unit of measurement. This makes it much easier to weigh out the quantities you will need, particularly if your total will be a round number. For example, if your total in grams will be 1000 grams and the recipe calls for 10% Palm oil, then you will measure out 100 grams (10% of 1000) for Palm oil.
Using grams also makes it easier for making small test batches. Keep in mind, we don’t know how good this recipe is. Do you want to use a 1000 grams of material on your first effort? Instead, you may consider making a batch with a total of 100 grams. In this case, the 5% requirement for Cocoa Butter would be covered with simply 5 grams of Cocoa Butter. Making a test batch may be a little tricky, but it can save you money. To make a test batch, you will have to warm your oils and butters in a small stainless steel pot or sauce/dip warmer. Also instead of using a stick blender and whisk, you will have to use a milk frother.
Next, you will have to determine the amounts of Sodium Hydroxide and Potassium Hydroxide you will need. Because you are making a cake of soap that needs to be soft enough to lather with a brush, you need both kinds of lye. Sodium Hydroxide is used for making hard bars of soap. Potassium Hydroxide is used for making liquid soap. So combining these should make a soap that is somewhere in the middle. Most writers on the topic suggest starting with 60% Potassium Hydroxide and 40% Sodium Hydroxide. This is a variable you should probably play with a little. Keep in mind that Stearic acid is very hard, so perhaps a little more Potassium Hydroxide might work better.
Calculating Lye
Since this is a dual-lye soap, calculating the lye is a two-step process. The first step is to make two separate calculations for lye usage, as if each calculation was for a single lye soap. So, you would calculate the amount of Sodium Hydroxide you would use as if you are making a bar of soap. You can do this with an online soap recipe calculator or you can do it manually. Since most people don’t know how to perform this calculation manually, let me show you quickly how simple it is. Basically, all you need to do is multiply the amount (in grams or ounces) of your oil or butter by the SAP ratio. The result is the amount you need (in grams or ounces) of lye. And DON’T FORGET, Sodium Hydroxide(NaOH) and Potassium Hydroxide (KOH) have different SAP ratios!
Below I am listing the recipe requirements for a 1000 gram batch:
OIL AMOUNT SAP RATIO (NaOH)
Stearic Acid 300 grams x 0.141 = 42.3 g
Coconut Oil 200 grams x 0.191 = 38.2 g
Castor Oil 50 grams x 0.129 = 6.45 g
Cocoa Butter 50 grams x 0.138 = 6.9 g
Shea Butter 50 grams x 0.130 = 5 g
Almond Oil 100 grams x 0.137 = 13.7 g
Avocado Oil 100 grams x 0.134 = 13.4 g
Palm Oil 100 grams x 0.142 = 14.2 g
Argan Oil 50 grams x 0.135 = 6.75g
1000 g (oils & butters) 146.9g NaOH
So, if you were simply making a bar of soap, you would need 146.9 grams of Sodium Hydroxide if the oils and butters totaled 1000 grams. Our final recipe will have a different value, but we will get to that later. For now, let’s go through the same process using the SAP ratio for Potassium Hydroxide (KOH).
Amount SAP Ratio (KOH)
Stearic Acid 300 g x 0.199 = 59.7 g
Coconut oil 200 g x 0.269 = 53.8
Castor Oil 50 g x 0.181 = 9.05
Cocoa Butter 50 g x 0.194 = 9.7
Shea Butter 50 g x 0.183 = 9.15
Almond Oil 100 g x 0.193 = 19.3 g
Avocado Oil 100 g x 0.188 = 18.8 g
Palm Oil 100 g x 0.2 = 20 g
Argan Oil 50 g x 0.19 = 9.5g
1000g oils & butters 209 g KOH
IMPORTANT: The amounts we have calculated so far for the NaOH and KOH are not the final numbers. Remember, to make this soap soft enough to use, we will use more KOH and a lesser amount of NaOH. To calculate the final numbers, we will multiply the totals in grams we found above by a ratio of whichever percentage we prefer. So, if we wanted the lye to be 75% KOH and 25% NaOH, we would calculate as follows:
209 grams KOH x .75 = 156.75 grams
146.9 grams NaOH x .25 = 36.73 grams
Just to be safe, it is usually a good idea to discount the lye. Doing this leaves some free oils that help condition the skin. But more importantly it reduces the possibility that the final soap will be lye heavy. Even if a soap is just a little lye heavy it will dry out the skin.
So let’s say we want to discount the lye by 5%. Here’ how we do it. First, multiply the amount of lye by .05 and then subtract the result (5%) from the original lye, as follows:
156.75 gm of KOH x .05 = 7.84gm
156.75 gm – 7.84 gm = 148.91 gm of KOH
We will do the same for the NaOH as follows:
36.73 gm of NaOH x .05 = 1.84gm
36.73 gm – 1.84 gm = 34.89 gm of NaOH
So, you now have the method for calculating how much lye you need. Remember, the example provided here is not set in stone. You should be using this as a basis for experimenting. If you think the lye proportions should be different, do the calculations using different percentages. Also, if you want to do test batches with small quantities, all you have to do is divide everything in the recipe by 10 and that should be enough to make a single portion of shave soap.
PROCEDURE
This soap will be a hot-process soap. A recipe of this type cannot be done with the cold-process because of the high amount of Stearic Acid. If you have never used Stearic Acid, you should know it is a difficult material to work with. In cold-process soaps, Stearic Acid cannot be used at above a level of 1-2%. The melting point of Stearic Acid is about 157 degrees F. When brought into contact with lye, it usually re-solidifies rapidly. In short, in order to work with it, you need to keep it hot.
Assuming you are making a batch of 1000 grams, you will start by butting your oils and butters in a slow cooker and heat them at the “high” setting. Stearic acid will melt slowly. When half of it is melted, you may try reducing the heat to the “low” setting.
Preparing the Lye
As the oils begin to warm, you can start preparing the dual lye solution. You will dissolve your lyes in distilled water. But how much? With water we can be flexible. A good rule of thumb for cold-process is that if the water weighs twice as much as the lye, this is a good starting point. But for hot process, you should use even more. If the water weighs 3 or even 4 times the weight of the lye, that will be okay. In the process of cooking the soap, a lot of water evaporates. In fact, there is nothing wrong with adding water during the cook if the batch seems to be getting too thick and lacking in water. But there no such thing as starting out with too much water in hot-process soap. If your batch seems too watery, just cook the water away. Your soap will not be under-processed.
In this dual-lye solution, you will first add the
Mixing the Oil and Lye
The reason you need to keep an infrared thermometer on hand while soaping is that we need to regulate the temperature for safety. The one big danger in hot-process soaping is that the batch can possibly “volcano.” If not neglected and allowed to get too hot, your batch may explode and make a mess of the room. The first step to making sure this doesn’t happen is to check the temperatures when you mix the oil and lye.
As I said earlier, Stearic acid needs to be kept pretty hot to keep it in its liquid form. I would suggest getting the temperature as low as you can before the Stearic Acid starts congealing again. This is hot enough. So when you add the lye, it should not be any hotter. If the temperature is somewhat lower, that is fine. If the temperature of the lye is significantly lower than the temperature of the oil, then when you combine them you will see the Stearic Acid instantly congeal. This is okay; all you have to do is keep it warm and work it with a whisk or stick blender. In any case, as the oil and lye react, the temperature will rise. If it goes too high, the “volcano” explosion may occur. The way to avoid this is to steadily whisk your batch.
The Cook Process
You will need to cook your batch on low heat at least 30 minutes and perhaps as much as an hour. When you begin the cook, you need to create a emulsion of the oil and lye water. This is done easiest with a stick (or immersion) blender. Use your blender sparingly. Most beginners make the mistake of blending too much. It only takes a few minutes. Once you have succeeded in creating an emulsion, cover your slow cooker with stretch plastic wrap. The best brand to use for this is the Kirkland Stretch-Tite sold at Costco. This wrap is strong enough to take the heat.
You may or may not see your batch go through different cook phases, identifiable by different appearances. To learn more about these phases, you can read about it in my other article on hand-crafted soap. In general, you will want to check the appearance and temperature every 10-15 minutes and whisk or blend when necessary. If you see the batch going through a phase, such as separation, allow it make complete progress in that phase before whisking it. The main sign of danger of possible eruption is that the batch starts getting large and puffy and hot. When you see this, whisk vigorously.
Another thing you may do during the cook is add water, if necessary. Adding water can help reduce the temperature. But remember, since we are making shaving soap, the batch needs to be more fluid than a regular batch for bar soap. We will need to pour this into small containers. So add water as you see fit to keep the batch workable.
How do you Know When it is Ready?
The test that many/most soapers use to determine if saponification is complete is the Zap test. The Zap test is simply that you take a small portion of the soap and touch it on the tip of your tongue. If the soap is NOT ready, you will feel a zap, as if you touched your tongue to a 9-volt battery. If the soap is done, you will feel nothing. This might sound scary to you, but it is not so bad. Alternatively, you might try using pH paper to test for the presence of alkalinity. Remember, if the batch is still alkaline, then it is not ready. Alkalinity in soap will dry out skin and/or cause skin irritation.
Winding Down the Cook
Once saponification is complete, you can start wrapping it up. All that remains to be done is to add your scent and maybe additional superfatting oil and then pour the mixture into containers.
Ending the cook is a little tricky because you need to bring down the temperature and you run the risk of the batch drying out somewhat. You need to bring the temperature down for two reasons. The first reason is that it needs to be low for you to add your scent. The second reason is that if you are pouring your batch into plastic containers and it is too hot, it can melt and mis-shape your containers.
Now, just a word about temperature and scents. Essential oils have a flash point. If they are added to material that is above the flash point, the EO will evaporate and be lost. The flash point for each essential oil is different. If you look on the website of a reputable seller, you will probably find technical in formation listed. EOs are expensive. You don’t want to waste them by adding them to a hot batch.
If you are using a fragrance oil instead of an EO, you will still be better off by adding it at the lowest temperature possible. If added at too hot a temperature, FOs can discolor your batch. You may not see this immediately. In fact, it may develop gradually over several days.
If you are using a crock pot (slow cooker) remove the ceramic pot from the heating element. Keep it covered with the plastic wrap. If left uncovered, water can evaporate and your batch can dry out. Because the ceramic retains heat, it will take a while for the temperature to go down. It can take 15-45 minutes. Monitor the heat with your infrared thermometer. When the temperature is low enough for your EO or FO, add it and use a whisk to thoroughly incorporate it throughout your mixture.
Serving the Batter
The last step is to distribute the material into the containers you have. You should aim for a 3-5 ounce range. That is all you should use. A decent stainless steel kitchen ladle is your tool of choice for this task. You do not want your container to be all the way full. If there is still a 3/4 inch space from the level of the soap to the top of the container, that is perfect. Having some wall space like that is good in use because it allows the user to push lather up against the wall of the container to load up the brush with lather. Once you have filled the containers, allow them to cool down with their lids on so no moisture is lost.