I'm a little late in reporting back, but hubby has shaved with the 64% KOH/36% NaOH croap that I made by combining both lyes together into one solution and saponifying everything together in one pot, instead of separately saponifying the KOH with the hard fats/stearic in one pot, and saponifying the NaOH with the liquid oils in a separate pot, and then combining them together. The results? Hubby could tell no difference, so I'm going to save myself some trouble and just combine both lyes together into one solution and saponify everything together in one pot from now on.
Also- I just wanted to add some observations that hubby made in regards to the croaps vs my normal 100% NaOH hard pucks..... He told me over the weekend that he found the croaps to be more tricky to lather in comparison to my hard puck. To explain, he said that although the croaps lather very easily in comparison to the puck, he has to be mindful to not add too much water to the croap while loading and lathering or else the cushion is reduced to nil in spite of the resulting lather being quite copious. He said that when he's mindful to not go overboard on the water that the cushion is perfect. With the hard puck, the water amount seems to be less persnickety.
I asked him if I should go back to just making him the 100% NaOH hard puck then, and he said that although he likes both the hard puck and the croap and is quite happy to use either one, he actually prefers the croap for the ease of lather in spite of having to be extra mindful to not add too much water.
My next experiment is to try this:
Stearic acid 40%
Tallow 40%
Mango Butter 20%
100% KOH
I am going to scent it with Barbershop 1920's from AH/RE. I just received a sample of it and hubby said the smell of it is spot-on to the childhood memories he has of waiting in the barbershop for his dad to get done with his shave and trim. I hope the scent does not morph when soaped. I'm kind of concerned about it because some (but not all) of the reviews I read said that it did tend to morph, but since I'll be HPing this batch and adding the FO after the cook, hopefully I'll have better luck. We'll see!
I scented my last croap with Santa's Pipe from SweetCakes, which is a cherry-tobacco scent. It's pretty strong. I only used .3 oz ppo in the croap and hubby said he could smell it on his hands every time he touched his face throughout the day. I asked him if I should take it a notch down to .2 oz ppo and he said no- .3 oz ppo was fine.
IrishLass
