Lessons

Lesson Info

Handmade Beauty Box: Shaving Soap

This is a really fun and versatile base product that we're using called foaming bath butter. So foaming bath butter is a soft soap that is created using gentle surfactants for a very creamy and smooth lather. Like most of the other products that we've made in this course, you can add fragrances and colors, even clays, hohoba beads, exfoliants in it, to really make it your own. You can also melt it in the microwave and pour it and so it turns into a kind of soft, semi-soft soap product. You can whip it. You can add exfoliants to it. And there are many many creative things you can do. This is a really fun one to work with children with because since it is a gentle surfactant, it's not going to irritate or burn skin or anything like that. And the kids really love to get involved with whipping and really get involved with adding colors and fragrance, and kind of make it their own. And as a parent crafting, you don't really have to worry about kind of the safety concerns so much with heat p...

roducts or things that might be a little dangerous for your little ones to handle. So this is something I would happily make with my toddlers that are both under the age of five. So this is foaming bath butter. And, foaming bath butter is often referred to as some other things. You might see it referred to as bath whip, soft soap, creamy shaving soap, the cream soap, there's a lot of euphemisms for this type of product. But basically foaming bath butter is a soft soap base that you can melt and pour, actually melt down into a liquid and pour it into jars. Or you can whip it up with a stand mixer, we're gonna be using a hand mixer today, and it becomes a beautiful fluffy soap that you can use for frosting, like frosting actual soap. You can use it for a sugar scrub. You can use it for shaving soap. It accepts all the way up to 5% fragrance oil. And it already contains a preservative. And preservatives are something I've talked a lot about in this course and how important it is with anything that has water that's introduced to it that you do have a preservative. And the great thing about this foaming bath butter is that it comes with a preservative in it already. So you don't have to worry about that. In the first recipe that we're going to be making, we're making a shaving soap. So what makes a shaving soap a shaving soap versus a regular soap, right? Like, doesn't all soap, can't you shave with all soap? And the answer is absolutely. You could take a regular bar of soap, you could lather up, you could shave with it. But, I don't know about you guys but are you kind of just hearing the razor in your head just go, gh, gh, gh, gh, gh. And it just doesn't have the glide and the slip. Shaving soap has added ingredients to it to make the razor slip and slide smoothly and cleanly along the skin. In this case the added ingredient is bentonite clay. Bentonite clay, when you get it wet and add it to soap, helps produce basically a slick that helps the razor just glide smoothly and gently over the skin. So this recipe, the shaving soap recipe, uses bentonite clay for that slip. And in regular bar soap bentonite clay is the best option as well to make a shaving soap. So if you're like, "Oh, I love the idea of a shaving soap but you know, hey, you know, I'm super into DIY and I wanna make it myself. So I'm gonna take everything I learned about cold process soap making earlier in the course and I'm gonna make a shaving soap." You could totally do that with the addition of bentonite clay. And maybe a little bit of castor oil, 'cause castor oil in cold processed soap is great for shaving soap. In this recipe we're also using chamomile extract. And chamomile extract is great for anything that you're possibly irritating the skin with. So for example, the razor is very irritating on skin. Right? It's basically taking off the first layer of your skin along with the hair. The chamomile extract is anti-inflammatory and it helps really calm that redness down. It's really soothing to inflamed skin, which is why it's so great in shaving recipes. Olive oil. So in this case the olive oil is being used for moisture. Olive oil, if you think of the vegetable oil family, is a really kind of heavy oil. It sits heavy on the skin compared to say avocado oil or an apricot kernel oil. And the reason we're going with a heavier product here is because we really do want to leave a beautifully moist skin behind after we've used this as a shaving soap. We want our skin to feel like you don't need to put lotion on it. And so when you shave with this homemade shaving soap that we're gonna be making, you're not gonna need to use lotion after you get out the shower because this olive oil is so lovely and kind of heavy that it makes your skin feel moisturized and conditioned right when you get out of the shower. The fragrance choice that we're using, so, the fragrance choice is tobacco and bay leaf fragrance from Bramble Berry. And the reason I chose this one is it's kind of unisex so it's not too girly for men, yet it's not too masculine so a woman wouldn't be thrilled with using it. It's got top notes of bay leaf. And it's got some fir needle and cedar. And bergamot. Bergamot is this really interesting small Italian orange that smells crisper and tangier than a traditional orange. It's so this is a woodsy, spicy, soft note. It's comforting. It's clean. It's crisp. It's, it's funny, someone in our office described it as handsome. It blend really well though too with floral fragrances. So this is a really great one to use for the shaving soap because it's not too manly, not too girly girl. It's kind of unisex. But the fragrance or the essential oil choice, and even, even the extract that you want to use and even the liquid oils, these, like all the other things we've talked about in this course, these are proportions and suggestions. You can switch out olive oil to a sweet almond oil. You could switch out the chamomile extract to a, oh, seaweed extract. Right, you could do, instead of tobacco and bay leaf, you could go with a fragrance that smelled, reminded you of the sea, like salty mariner. Or something that really made you think sea. So, keep in mind that these are proportions. And you can really design anything you want. The only thing that really needs to stay the same for a shaving soap is this bentonite clay. So the shaving soap is a pretty easy product to make. As I mentioned, this foaming bath whip comes already pre, like it's pre-made. It's like melt and pour where all you do is you start working with it with the ingredients. And so the foaming bath whip comes in a flat kind of tray. You scoop it out into this container. And this mixing bowl has been sanitized. So it's been, it's been given its bleach water. Dunking and baptism. And I have all of my ingredients ready to go. With any do it yourself bath and beauty, preparation is 99% of being successful. So I have all of my ingredients ready to go. And I have my hand mixer. And again you can use a stand mixer. In this case we're just gonna use a hand mixer. And, (mixer running) so you whip this a little bit first. You just kind of wanna soften it up. And the reason you wanna soften it up is because when we add our liquids to this, our olive oil, you want the olive oil to kind of actually have someplace to go. As opposed to just sitting inertly on big boulders of soap. So we're just whipping this up just a little bit. And then once this is whipped up, you can see it's really getting light and fluffy already, just take your spatula, and gently move, waa, gently move this down on the sides. 'Cause you want everything to get really evenly mixed in. And once we've got everything down in the middle again, we're gonna add our olive oil and we're gonna add our chamomile extract. And, we're, this is four ounces of olive oil by weight to two pounds, so that 32 ounces, of foaming bath butter. And then we're going with a full one ounce of chamomile extract. And adding this all to our mixture. And then we're gonna just beat this on, kind of low to medium for just about one minute. Until all of our (mixer running), waa, until all of the oil and the extract is mixed in and homogenized, meaning we want it to be really mixed in. It's okay if you didn't mix it in. Like, nothing bad would happen, right? Like, the olive oil wouldn't hurt you. But then you'd be left with an oil slick as opposed to a beautiful shaving soap. So once this is fully mixed in, then you, when you're making this, if you're making it to give away or to sell, you just wanna kind of periodically scrape down to make sure you have it fully, fully in the middle so you give everything the best chance of mixing in. And then whip this one more time. We just wanna make sure (mixer running) everything is really light and fluffy. And then when we reach a really fluffy consistency, two tablespoons of bentonite clay, and we're gonna add our .7 ounces of, our .7 ounces of our tobacco and bay leaf. And so the two tablespoons of bentonite clay, it was roughly one ounce of bentonite clay, by weight so that's all of this guy right here. So, put him in there. And then remember of course, whenever you add powder to anything that is a semi-solid you wanna kind of just mix it in a little bit before you turn on your blender or else you can (mixer running) end up with a giant kind of poof ball. And so you mix this on low for about a minute. And then on high after this, after you're kind of more mixed in, until you get a really nice, light, fluffy consistency. Believe it or not, it is possible to over-whip. And if you over-whip the entire thing kind of falls like a souffle. Wee. And so there we go with this guy. And then the final touch is just to put your shaving soap into containers. And, it's very very easy to just put into the containers and these are bail jars. So they're cosmetic grade packaging that have the nice gaskets so they seal really beautifully. And they have the rim around the top to make sure that they are airtight so they're good for shipping. And, and then this is about probably about as full as you want to fill it because remember this little guy goes down in. So all you do is go like that. And then you seal it. And there is your shaving soap. It's ready to give away. It's ready to use. It's ready to label. It's ready to sell. So this is super great for men. My husband loves shaving with it. Like loves loves. It's great for shaving legs. And it's got a very nice low pH. So the pH is right around 5.5. And, it's paraben free. The preservative in there. So it's a fantastic product that is really versatile. And this is your shaving soap. And you are, you're done. Like that is so easy to make. And I love the instant gratification factor of it. Like, you can use it right away. There's no curing. There's no dry time. And that's one of the things that, when, if you're thinking about making this a business, and you're thinking about having like a stand at the market or something you don't only want all your products to be cold processed soap and take four to six weeks to cure. You want some products that are faster for you to make and faster for you to be able to fill your stall and your booth with. And you wanna full compliment of products that you can really appeal to many people with. So are there any question? Kena I would love to chat about some of the ingredients. Absolutely. We have Katy H. asking, "I've heard that bentonite clay and other clays in a soap will dull a razor more quickly. Have you experienced, heard or experienced that? And do you have any other recommendations, maybe silk protein," is the question. So, can clays dull razors more quickly? Yeah I mean, you're, it's dirt. It's a purified dirt. But when it's mixed with soap, generally what it's doing it's creating almost like a little oil slick. And then the razor is able to kind of more smoothly glide. 'Cause when you think of your skin, and you think of all the kind of little microscopic crevasses in there, what happens when you're soaping up with this is got a nice lather, a nice slick, it actually smooths out the entire surface so the razor only is getting hair as opposed to kind of going, ram ram ram ram, over your microscopically damaged skin. And so, if it dulls or, I haven't heard it dulls the razors before, if it did, I think it would be such a small amount of razor dulling that I, I personally think it'd be totally worth it to have that extra moisture and extra conditioning. Silk proteins. Fantastic product. I love using silk proteins in bath and body products. There is this tusa silk powder, and it's not even silk powder, it's like silk strands that I love to put into cold processed soap, it's actually silk strands that you dissolve into the lye water and you put it in your soap. And it just gives it such a silky feel. In this type of product, you would want to be getting not the silk strand fibers, you would want to actually get silk that was dissolved in liquid. So you can buy a liquid silk, which is the silk strands, that are dissolved in the liquid so you can add it to here. I personally, it's very interesting, because I find that it adds to, well a silky feeling in lather for soap, I don't notice the addition of silk proteins in rinse off products that haven't been emulsified. So soap that's been emulsified. And I don't notice it, like so when I add the silk to this, it's, it, I don't notice it personally. It's more like an inert substance almost in there for me. So that's one of those things that you really wanna test yourself and if you notice the difference, that's all that matters. Or, remember marketing. If you're selling this, and you want the label appeal of hand-crafted silk in here, by all means it's totally worth putting .5% of hand-crafted liquid silk in here for sure. But it will not give you the same slip as the clay will. The two act as different things in this recipe. May I ask what's in the foaming bath butter? The foaming bath butter is 100% surfactants. So it starts out, and this in order, this is descending order, 'cause remember we do legal ingredients. So liquid glycerine. Remember liquid glycerine from earlier in the course? I was showing how thick it was during the lotions portion. Very very thick humectin. It's got liquid glycerine in there first. Second is water. The third ingredient is sorbitol. And sorbitol is basically kind of a cheap inert sugar. And in this what it uses, what it's used for is it's used to kind of suspend all of the surfactants within it and sugar interestingly enough acts as a secondary lathering agent. Then it has sodium colocolic. Laurel isethi, laurel isethionate. Disodium laurel sulfosalicylic. It's not disodium laurel sulfate. It's disodium laurel sulfosalicylic. Which is considered a much much gentler of the laurel sulfates, like way way way more gentle. And then it's got salt. The salt in there is used as a thickener. Polyethoxyethanol, which is a preservative system. And tetrasodium edta. And tetrasodium edta is a cheylating agent that is commonly used, you're not even gonna believe this, commonly used in hospitals to inject into IVs to pull out heavy minerals from IVs so they don't clog up the IVs. So in this case, the tetrasodium edta is used to bind with the minerals in hard water so that you get lots of foam. Because if you're using hard water, and like, some water is hard, some water is soft depending on the treatment plant, depending on if you're on city water or well water, and hard water, all those minerals bind literally with the soap that you're using or the scrub and they can really decrease lather. So in this case it's got the extra edta added to it to make sure that you have lots of good lathering. So, for the most part, it's glycerine, water, surfactants, and then preservative. Sorry, I didn't mean to put you through all those names. That was much more thorough than I was expecting. No it's totally fine. So, and that's one of the reasons it has such a low pH too. Natural hand-made soap always has a pH that is higher than neutral. That's how natural soap cleans. It's be, it has a pH that is between about eight and nine, 7.7 to nine, that's the range of natural soap. You actually can't bring it down much lower than that and keep it natural. This has a pH of 5.5. Which is lower than that. And the reason it's able to do that, which means it's extremely gentle to skin, like so gentle to skin, the reason it's able to do that is because of the surfactants. So often times when you see products that are geared towards babies, a lot of times they'll have surfactants in them because they have a naturally lower pH than an all natural hand-made soap does. Which is an interesting little side note. Even though with my, with my babies I definitely use my own soap that I made for them. I bet you did. Can you tell us again, this is for Gail Friday, is kaolin and bentonite the same? Or are they interchangeable? Yes, you can interchange kaolin and bentonite clays in your shaving soaps. Those are the only two I'd probably interchange. The rose clay and the french green clay and the sea clays and all of that, are often heavier, the sea clay especially will have the bigger dense, bigger particle. So the kaolin and the bentonite sure. Go back and forth with. But that's about the only one I'd kind of go back and forth with without a lot of kind of, without a lot of testing on friends and family. And be like, hey, do you feel like this rose clay is as good as the bentonite or the kaolin clay? 'Cause I, I personally notice a difference if it's not the kaolin and bentonite. Another question from Amanda Nelson, was would it be possible to change some things in the recipe to make an aftershave oil, lotion, or balm instead of a soap? So if you wanted to make an aftershave lotion or balm, you definitely would want to rewind the course and watch the balm section or watch the lotion section because since those are leave-on products you definitely would not want to be leaving this on your skin 'cause this is basically, this is a soap. Right? This is actually a soap. So you wouldn't want to leave this on your skin. But you could definitely do an after, an aftershave. I've done aftershave balms and aftershave recipes at soapqueen.com so there are some free recipes there. Or you could pretty easily kind of make your own manly man facial oil with sweet almond oil, apricot kernel oil, tomato seed oil, and chia seed oil. And then add maybe a drop or two of that tobacco and bay leaf fragrance. Or another manly man fragrance and that would be a great lightweight facial oil for after shaving. That would be fantastic. Or you could take the lotion recipe we made earlier maybe increase the water with a, by five or 10%, decrease the butters and the oils by five or 10%, that would make a lightweight facial after after, like aftershave lotion that would be really nice. So yes you can. Just not with this. Also, you're such a wealth of knowledge. I know I've been saying that all day. But it's like, I wanna have you on my speed dial so I could be like, this person likes this fragrance what can I make? What could I make them. Well good news, a lot of people basically have me on speed dial 'cause they're, they post on Facebook. They at me on Twitter. And I mean bath and body is literally, like this is my life. It's been my life for two decades. And I love talking about it. So this is a real treat to be able to talk about it for an entire day.