Mediterranean Garden Spa Shaving Soap

Time to make more shaving soap for the hubby! I found David Fisher's shaving soap recipe on About.com and thought that it sounded nice.

The recipe calls for coconut and palm oils for a stable, creamy lather. Olive oil, sweet almond oil, and cocoa butter condition the skin and provide lots of luxury. Castor oil, which I usually use at around 3%-5% of the total oils, is bumped up to 10% for an extra boost of lather. And bentonite clay (about 1 Tablespoon per pound of oils) gives the soap some extra slip for shaving with the added benefit of being oh-so-good for skin.

(Tip: Mix the bentonite clay with a little bit of liquid glycerin before adding it to the soap to prevent clumping.)

Here's the recipe I used:

~ Coconut oil - 30% ~

~ Palm oil - 30% ~

~Castor oil - 10% ~

~ Sweet almond oil - 15% ~

~ Olive oil - 10% ~

~ Cocoa butter - 5% ~

I did tweak David's recipe a bit. His calls for sunflower oil, but I didn't have any so I substituted sweet almond oil in its place. (And I ran the new recipe through a lye calculator, of course!)

The first thing I noticed about this recipe is that 65% of the oils are hard oils. Olive oil accounts for only 10% of the total oils. Most of my soap recipes are fairly heavy on olive oil with it being about 40%-50% of the total oils. The last shaving soap I made was 45% olive oil. Also, 72% of the oils were soft oils in the last recipe, and palm was a mere 8% of the total oils. This new shaving soap recipe is kinda the opposite of the previous one, so I was very curious to try it.

Once I had settled on a recipe, it was off to the fragrance cabinet to find a clean, masculine scent. I had a one-ounce bottle of Mediterranean Garden Spa fragrance oil, which was perfect since I was using one pound of oils for my recipe.The scent smells very green, herbaceous, and outdoorsy to me. The colors blue and green came to mind, and I decided to do an in-the-pot swirl.

Soon after adding the fragrance oil, bentonite clay, and lye solution to the oils and stickblending for a bit, the soap batter thickened to a pudding-like consistency. I'm not sure what caused this, considering that many factors can contribute to trace acceleration. The batter was workable, though, so I continued on with my plan to swirl. I managed to get the soap colored and then swirled the colors together, but it just didn't pour fluidly, which is what you really need for a successful ITP swirl. I knew that the soap batter didn't have the right consistency for an ITP swirl, but I pig-headedly carried on. Perhaps I would have had better luck with an in-the-shaving-bowl swirl.

Here's a video of me making this soap:


The soap still turned out lovely manly, and I kinda like the textured look in the bowls. And as the soap gets used, the swirls start to reveal themselves more.

It has been a few months since I made this shaving soap, and my hubby has been using it for a while now. He says that it's his favorite shaving soap so far, and he really likes the recipe. Sounds like it's a keeper! I may go in search of a palm-free shaving soap recipe, too, and see how he likes that.

The soap seems to be lasting him a good while, too - I think we're working on month three now - and the soap stays nice and hard and dry in between uses, not gummy at all.

I'll bet this would make an awesome body bar, too! I usually use regular soap to shave with in the shower, but I should make a bigger batch of this and make bars out of it. Then I could enjoy this shaving soap recipe, too!

Do you like shaving soaps? Got a favorite recipe?

Shaving Soap, Then and Now

Melt-and-pour shaving soap that I made for Valentine's Day, 2010.

Let's go back to early 2010 for a moment. The Winter Olympics were about to start in Vancouver, a U.S. postage stamp cost 44 cents, and Steve Carell was still on "The Office." And I had been making melt-and-pour soap for about a year.

Valentine's Day was approaching and I wanted to give my hubby, Ken, something special. With Christmas over, I was fresh out of gift ideas. I decided to make something for him. In the past, I had baked him something sweet or made homemade pralines. In 2010, I realized that I could make something else:

Soap.

Yippee, right? I mean, we were drowning in soap. Why would anyone in my household get excited about, well, more soap?

Because this soap was just for him. See, I made him a shaving soap. I went out and bought a shaving kit, tossed the soap that came with it, and filled the bowl with my own. I used Bramble Berry's melt-and-pour shaving soap base, added one teaspoon of bentonite clay per pound of soap, and scented it with a Eucalyptus and Cedar fragrance oil. I even made some red soap hearts (created with a candy mold) to stick on the top.

Ken liked the shaving soap very much and asked that I keep making it for him. So I bought another shaving kit - so I'd have another bowl - and replenished his supply as needed.

Flash forward to the summer of 2012 when I made shaving soap from scratch for the first time. While the melt-and-pour shaving base is very nice, I wanted to create my own since I now knew how to make cold process soap.

Cold process shaving soap, July 2012

I found this shaving soap recipe courtesy of Steve from Soap Making Resource and decided to give it a try:

~ Olive oil (45% of total oils )
~ Coconut oil (20% of oils)
~ Castor oil (20% of oils)
~ Palm oil (8% of oils)
~ Sweet almond oil (7% of oils)

Steve's recipe makes five pounds of soap, but I needed only one pound to fill three of my shaving bowls. (I now have four bowls so I can make three more shaving soaps when Ken starts on his last one.) So I plugged the percentages of oils into SoapCalc to customize the recipe to my needs. (It's a good idea to run a recipe through a lye calculator to double-check it. And always run a recipe through a lye calculator if you make any changes to it.)

Steve also includes some additives in his recipe. I adjusted the amounts of the additives so they would fit into my parameters. I ended up using:

~ Bentonite clay (one Tablespoon per pound of oils)
~ Colloidal oats (one Tablespoon per pound of oils)

Bentonite clay adds a layer of protection to the skin and gives the blade some slip, and the colloidal oats (I used finely ground regular oats) make the soap extra soothing. I added the bentonite clay at trace and stickblended briefly to fully incorporate it into the batter. Then I stirred in the oats. Once the clay and oats are added, the batter gets pretty thick.

One thing worth noting is that bentonite clay has a tendency to clump. To get around this issue, I used a mini whisk to mix the clay with some liquid glycerin before adding it to my soap batter. I would think that mixing the clay with some oil would also work, although I have not tried that myself.

Grinding oats, mixing clay with glycerin, and pouring soap into shaving bowls

For the scent, I chose Bramble Berry's Blue Man fragrance oil, which behaves beautifully and smells great. The fragrance oil does discolor to a medium brown due to the vanilla notes, which make this scent a bit sweet but masculine.

Probably one of the first things you'll notice about this recipe is that it has a high percentage of castor oil. This is to help create a rich lather for shaving. It does make a soft soap initially - I had some batter left over that I poured into individual molds and the soap bars were quite soft when I unmolded them a few days later. After a few weeks of curing time, though, the water evaporates out and the soap hardens nicely.

I actually made this soap several months ago, but I decided to save this post until now because I have been focused on holiday soaps the last few months. So, Ken has had some time to use this shaving soap, and he enjoys it very much. He reports that it feels good on the skin and that the lather is creamy and dense. The shaving soap lasts quite a while, too - he's been using the same soap for about three months now and still has a bit to go before it's gone. And he's got another bowl of shaving soap from the same batch waiting to be used. I figure the pound of shaving soap I make for him will last him somewhere between 9-12 months.

Are you a fan of shaving soaps? Do you make or buy them for yourself or someone else? Got a favorite recipe?