Citronella scented shave soap
- Thread starter LuckyGlenn
- Start date
- Thread starter
- #22
You really don't get the citronella scent? To me it's the main note with a clean soapy undertone
Agree with LuckyGlenn @sarimento1 , there is some citronella in the Williams aroma profile. There are other elements and the scent is light giving it a nice "old school" scent that I find enjoyable. Much milder than Arko.
Good description of the Williams scent, and comments from others who detected something like Citronella here:
The Scent of a Williams
There has been a lot of questions and discussion about the scent of Williams Mug Soap. Is it Lemon? Citronella? Or something else? So I thought I'd take a chance and email Combe Inc. to see if they would tell me what the scent was. I don't remember when I sent the request, but it has been a...
www.badgerandblade.com
Note that the strongest Citronella scent of all I've experienced is straight Zote. It's the only scent ingredient in Zote so very strong. Zote ingredients include:
Sodium Tallowate - 55%
Sodium Cocoate -- 16%
Glycerin/Glycerol -- 2%
Citronella Oil -- 0.5%
Water -26.5%
Source, Zote Material Data Safety Sheet
Haha same- to me it screams citronella.
Perhaps the vintage pucks in the photo lost their scent. I have a few vintage pucks I'm afraid to touch that don't smell of anything at all.
I dug out a three to four year old custom blended soap puck I made from equal parts of Williams, Van Der Hagen Deluxe and Zote with a roughly 1 oz. chunk of Dove Men+Care stuck in the middle (place in roughly two years ago to enhance the lather). Leftover from my early DE shaving Zote experiments that I was about to bin (Nothing wrong with the soap, just have so many great commercial soaps now). Decided to try it one last time.
The result was a pleasant surprise with the puck delivering one of my best shaves ever from a really creamy slick lather via my "mug soap" method. Thanks to what I suspect is the moisture content in the Zote the components appeared to be more blended (grated flakes far less visible) and aging had allowed all of the strong citronella smell from the Zote to dissipate. The aroma was a more natural almost sweet soap smell. Have seen similar enhanced blending in my other custom pucks that are 2-3 years old. When first made one could still see the Williams and Ivory shavings distinctly distributed throughout the pucks. Over time everything further melded together to the point where the flakes are no longer visible.
For reference my latest custom blend included Williams, Van Der Hagen Deluxe, Arko, Dove Men+Care, Proraso Red and some Ivory soap. Still have three of the five pucks I blended around 2.5 years ago.
No plans to make more of this as I've plenty of other excellent commercial soaps as well as a few pucks of my later blends. Interesting to see how aging improved the blend performance and earned this puck a reprieve from the trash bin. Will continue to use this occasionally.
The result was a pleasant surprise with the puck delivering one of my best shaves ever from a really creamy slick lather via my "mug soap" method. Thanks to what I suspect is the moisture content in the Zote the components appeared to be more blended (grated flakes far less visible) and aging had allowed all of the strong citronella smell from the Zote to dissipate. The aroma was a more natural almost sweet soap smell. Have seen similar enhanced blending in my other custom pucks that are 2-3 years old. When first made one could still see the Williams and Ivory shavings distinctly distributed throughout the pucks. Over time everything further melded together to the point where the flakes are no longer visible.
For reference my latest custom blend included Williams, Van Der Hagen Deluxe, Arko, Dove Men+Care, Proraso Red and some Ivory soap. Still have three of the five pucks I blended around 2.5 years ago.
No plans to make more of this as I've plenty of other excellent commercial soaps as well as a few pucks of my later blends. Interesting to see how aging improved the blend performance and earned this puck a reprieve from the trash bin. Will continue to use this occasionally.
Always enjoy hearing about how your soap experiments turn out.
