Castor oil in shaving soap revisited

[psfred]

Last fall I make some shave soap with 20% castor oil to try it out. I wasn't sure it was a great idea, but several other members reported good results using that much.

I made three very similar soaps, one with stearic acid, tallow, and castor, one with stearic acid, coconut oil, and castor, and one with stearic acid and tallow plus 10% coconut oil. The last is one of my favorite shave soap recipies, great lather, great slickness. All have 5% each cocoa butter and shea butter and 5% SF.

I shaved a few times with all of them in the past and they seemed pretty similar other than the SA/tallow soap being superior, but when I used the I was disappointed. Foamy lather to start with, didn't want to work up into dense, wet lather like the SA/tallow soap, and when I went to re-apply lather for my second pass there was none in the brush at all, it had vanished. Reloaded and that lather held better, but I got a lot more irritation than usual. Slickness was adequate, but nothing to get excited about, and my skin got sort of sticky after a minute or two.

I will test all three soaps some more in the next couple weeks and see what happens. So far I'm still in the "I don't like castor oil in shave soap" camp though.

 

[The Efficacious Gentleman]

I think to get a very fair test you'll have to make the exact same recipe as those which do contain higher castor amounts. If I just subbed castor in to my current recipe I imagine it would also be worse than the current lather is

 

[psfred]

I made three -- one close to my usual 50:30:10:5:5 SA:tallow:CO:Shea:Cocoa, one where the CO and part of the tallow were replaced with castor and one with only 10% tallow -- it's hard to make identical soaps with plus or minus 20% of an ingredient.

The soap with 20% tallow/20% castor produces the poorest lather, not what I expected. It's not a horrible shave soap, but it's not as good as any of the rest of the recipes I've tried. The collapse of the lather in the brush was a surprise though. Might have just been not enough soap on the brush, but even Williams poorly lathered rarely just vanishes that way.

This is just for fun and to see what effect castor actually has in shaving soap. I'm quite happy with my two favorite recipes, and last count have enough soap for about a decade of shaving already.