Since I am so happy with my homemade shampoo soap bars (I'm on my third batch now - each batch usually lasts around 10 months), I wanted to see if I could find a manageable recipe for homemade shaving soap as well. In all honesty, I've ever only tried one commercial shaving soap and one commercial shaving cream, but never been really happy with the foam from either of them. This probably have a lot to do with my brush-whipping technique, too, but it cannot hurt to try with a DIY shaving soap, can it?
However, most of the recipes online calls for a gazillion ingredients while I want more of a redux recipe. I took me quite some time, but eventually I stumbled upon this excellent thread by enthusiast soap-maker JBLA with his promising, small batch recipe with just stearic acid, coconut oil, water, potassium lye, and extra glycerin (when making soap, some glycerin results naturally but in the soap factories, that glycerin is allegedly taken out and used/sold for other purposes, but extra glycerin increases the soaps moisturising capabilities).
I use to make my shampoo soap bars using cold process soap making but since the creator of this recipe recommended the hot process for this shaving soap, since it otherwise traces really quickly due to the stearic acid. Hence, I fired up our trusty double-boiler and used that to simmer the soap mixture for a bit over two hours. This has the benefit of letting me use the soap as soon as it has cold down without any need of letting it cure for four weeks.
I had already saved a few suitable jars since before but also used the jar the coconut oil came in. Here is how it turned out:
