Shaving soap - for my barber friend

I love the old fashioned look that this colour gives. The razor
and the leather strop came in a cabinet that I bought that
had a small sink and a mirror perfect for bachelors to shave.

This one had better be good.  I wrote about my encounter with the barber before last Christmas a few posts ago.  I guess that one of the reasons that I never went back to him with a shaving soap that he could try is because I wasn't really sure that it was any good.  But that would of course be the whole point of having him try it.  To tell me if it was any good.

So I decided to make another shaving soap and this time I thought a lot about the ingredients.  The first one I basically did a soap recipe and added some clay to it.  It was pretty early in my soap making days and I just thought it was cool that adding clay would make the soap into shaving soap.  And, don't get me wrong,  it was a fine shaving soap, but I always thought I could improve it.  So I sat down and thought long and hard and this is what I came up with:

I need good lather, not because that's so important for a good shave, but because most men think it is.  So this one will be with a good percentage of Coconut oil.  To make up for the rather drying qualities of the Coconut oil I have to have some Olive oil because that is really conditioning and and it makes the lather stable.  The same goes for lard, which I included because it's macho... well... and conditioning and makes a good stable lather as well.  And of course I also had to include Castor oil which has such nice lather and conditioning, but makes a soft soap.  So I added some Cocoa Butter for it's moisturizing and hardening.  So that was all my oils.  Except I thought that Njóli oil (Rumex) would be very good in a shaving soap since it is so good for skin disorder and some men experience a rash from shaving.   So that added a bit of Sunflower oil as I had infused the Rumex root in that.  And for the water I did a tea from Shepherd's purse (Capsella bursa-pastoris).  And then I added the clay.

I made the soap in the traditional way and I had intended to use 15 g. of Njóli oil, but as I was pouring it into the soap at trace I kind of lost control and ended up with a lot more than that.  Luckily I had placed the bowl on the scale so I just adjusted the recipe.  This means that I will be making another soap with 15 g of the oil because I need to see what the colour will look like.  I was a bit concerned that the soap would look too pink and that wouldn't be macho enough, but then I thought that maybe the green colour of the weed tea should make it a bit more brown.  I'll have to see what my barber friend says about the colour, but here is the recipe (always run it through a calculator, the oz. are approx.):

Coconut oil       33% 175 g / 6.2 oz
Olive oil            24% 125 g / 4.4 oz
Lard                   23% 120 g / 4.2 oz
Castor oil         9%      50 g / 1.8 oz
Sunflower oil    5%    26 g /  0.9 oz  (Rumex longifolius infused)
Cocoa butter      5%     5 g / 0.8 oz
Bentonite clay    1.5 tbs


Shepherds purse tea         38%  208g / 7.4 oz
Lye                                                     75g / 2.6 oz
6% SF.

I poured this into a tube and used silicone baking sheets to make sure I could get it out again.  That worked really well, except that I got a "seam" along the soap tube.  But I got it out really easily.

Now, I don't think I should be the judge of how this turned out.  I will simply take this to my barber friend along with my first shaving soap (which I have in a very macho brown coffee cup) and see what he has to say about them.  I'll be posting the result.