Shave soaps revealed....

[Austinoire]

Stupid question: why are the Bond Street, Tabak and other shave soaps brands exclusively for shaving? I mean I used bars of Dove and Pre de provence in my life, but I don't think you can shave with those. So, what distinguishes a soap as one to shave with?

Thought I knew the answer, but after heading to a couple of nonshaving stores with soaps, I realized I had no clue, why a shaving soap was just that and a bath soap bar was not the same, or maybe it is?

[jww]

I am not a chemist, but I believe that if you did a full-on comparison of ingredients, you will find that shave soap has some differentiators to it from bathing soaps.

I expect someone far brighter and better informed than I will be able to give us a full-on explanation. This is SMF, after all, and there is always a subject matter expert hanging around on just about every esoteric topic we can think up.

[ShadowsDad]

The shave worthy shave soaps produce lather and the formula for shave soap is different than for bar soap for the shower, but there is a bit of cross over. That isn't to say that some bar soaps won't produce a shave worthy lather. Out of the supermarket "Clearly Natural" glycerine soap will produce a decent lather that's shave worthy. To use it for that I used to melt it into a tub using the microwave and I would add my own scent to it. If you try that do NOT leave it unattended. There is a very fine line between melting and boiling over and I guarantee that if you leave the microwave you'll experience the boil over.

I've heard of shave soaps that didn't produce shave worthy lather. I have used shave soaps that I wanted to use up in the shower, and they worked fine, so they can pull double duty. Some can't though but I''ve just heard of them and haven't experienced them, and I've forgotten the names. Gary, are you reading this?

[CMur12]

I'm not sure how it's done, but bath soaps seem to be formulated to produce looser suds, which are better for cleansing. (Note however that moisturizing soaps are often less sudsy.) Shaving soap is formulated to produce a tighter lather, for glide and cushion.

- Murray

[brothers]

. . . why are the Bond Street, Tabak and other shave soaps brands exclusively for shaving? . . . what distinguishes a soap as one to shave with?

The answer to your question is that the difference is in the quantities and ratios of the basic ingredients that make up the soap. It's not accurate to assume that certain brands only make shaving soaps. Most of the brand name manufacturers make both shaving and bath soaps. The bath soaps are less expensive than the shaving soaps.

I used bars of Dove and Pre de provence in my life, but I don't think you can shave with those.

Actually you can shave with anything (bath soap, peanut butter or plain water) but shaving soaps are considered by most users as superior in shaving performance!

[Brutus]

Tabac Original is (among others) available as shaving soap, shaving stick, shaving cream, and more importantly body soap and bath/shower gel.

I am unsure what you mean by "Bond Street" shaving soap, but if you should refer to the "Taylor of Old Bond Street" brand, they too offer dedicated bath and hand soaps along with their shaving soaps and creams.

Otherwise, as stated before, even if the list of ingredients should be identical, it does not follow that the proportions in which these ingredients are used are the same. Soaps are formulated to fulfill various requirements and in the case of shaving soaps these requirements (lubrication in particular) differ from bath soaps. Hence the ""Bangkok T-Shirt Approach" (also known as the "One size fits all" claim that is often used by T-shirt street vendors in Bangkok) does not work particularly well with shaving soaps, as you can tell from discussions where a sudden improvement or deterioration of a shaving soap is often explained away with the manufacturer having changed the "formulation".

If need be, some soaps can be adapted to a different role (for a short while I shaved as an experiment with a Valobra body soap bar; once I forgot to pack shaving soap in my travel kit and had to resort to hotel soap; and on occasion I thought that Williams perfoms better as a shower soap), although I never expected these products to perform particularly well in the adapted role.


B.

[nicodemus38]

you know when you say, lather up your hand with a bar of la toja or cella, and you have that greasy slidy feel? that's the hall mark of a shaving soap. Yes it will clean your face, but when you rinse it off, youll still feel that greasy/slimey feel.

With a REAL soap designed for CLEANING your face or your bottom or your hands, you DONT NORMALLY GET THAT WONDERFUL FEELING post rinse. you just feel squeaky clean, unless you use one of those girly assed moisturizing soaps.

[jww]

I knew there would be lots of informed responses to this.

I will share that I once tried the Swedish Sea Salt soap that you can buy in some specialty stores. They claim on the box that the product can be used as a body or shaving soap. It is not a good shaving soap, but it is an excellent body bar, although they don't last terribly long.

[Ouchmychin]

My son shaves in the shower every day and just uses whatever soap is around. I have given him good creams but when they're gone, they're gone. I don't know why a certain soap works for me but it just does. Right now its an ARKO shave stick. When I try one of the others I still like my stick best.

[Austinoire]

Could someone instruct this noob on how to properly use a arko stick. I am being offered one, but am unclear on exactly how to use it properly.

Thanks in advance.

[ShadowsDad]

The first way that comes to mind is to unwrap the end of it, keeping the wrapper on most of the stick. Moisten your whiskers and use them to "rasp off" soap from the stick onto your face. Then you face lather. How do you know when to stop loading your face? Well, too much soap isn't a bad thing, but too little is, so experience will tell you.

Another way is to shred the stick, or 2, into a bowl, add a few teaspoons of water and press the shreds together to form a puck. The water helps to get the shreds to slip and form a tighter puck. Allow it to "cure" for a few days, uncovered, then use it as you would any puck type soap. I find this method works best for me, YMMV. After loading the brush I face lather with this method.

[Ouchmychin]

Gary gave me a couple of old deodorant stick holders. Now I take the entire wrapper off of the stick. I jam it into the holder. Then before I shave. I fill the cap of the holder half full of hot water. I push the stick out far enough (at first it is already far enough) and invert the stick while holding the stick not the holder and dip it into the hot water and screw the top to the body. Leave it for as long as an hour or so. Then unscrew it and rub it vigorously all over your stubble. Lather up with a brush dipped in the hottest water and shaken out. At first the stick is too hard to get enough rubbed on, unless you do this. After a while it softens up so I can skip the soak and just dip it in right before a shave.

[drmoss_ca]

Making soap is a black art. Basic things to know is that sodium hydroxide tends to make a harder soap (we aren't talking about soap hardened after manufacture by milling and drying repeatedly here), and potassium hydroxide tends to make softer soaps. Beyond that, the fat used in the saponification process is critical to how the soap behaves. Commercial soaps have become almost all products of palm oil. OK, they are vegetarian-safe, but the palm trees used are grown in rows in freshly cleared land in New Guinea, land that orangutans used to call home, and they are threatened as a species now. I happen to like orangutans. Tallow is rendered beef fat and completely renewable. It also works far, far better in a shaving soap. Despite that, most buyers are uninformed and simply want to do the right thing, so they buy the veggie soap instead of the stuff that works. Manufacturers do what the market demands and swap their traditional and effective soap recipes for palm oil crap.

A soap doesn't have to use only one fat, and many blend various proportions of different fats to achieve a final result that can be fine-tuned into the shaving soap of your dreams. There is also the question of 'superfatting'—the chemical reaction of saponification uses an alkali and a fat, and it takes so much alkali to saponify so much fat (not a fixed value, hence the saponification index of different fats. Take a look here if you want to see how it works.) So you can put in more fat than alkali, and leave some unsaponified fat, which also alters the characteristics of the soap.

My home made soap, which took a few tries to get it right, uses equal parts of NaOH and KOH, along with
Lard 46%
Stearic Acid 30%
Coconut Oil (76º) 15%
Castor Oil 7%
Lanolin 2%

Chris