Stearate is an acid and can come from any fat be it animal or vegetable.
The response from Hadlinger:
Sorry for the late answer but our small company was closed.
Yes, we have eliminated tallow from our shaving soaps. I have been working on a new recipe for a long time since I wanted to keep in line with my grandfather's philosophy when he founded the company, of producing plant based cosmetics. The shaving soaps were the only products on our catalog that did not keep up with this philosophy. After much research I succeeded in producing a vegetable based soap that performs just as well as our previous tallow soaps.
Before releasing the newly formulated shaving soaps, we sent blind tests to our biggest distributers with the old tallow soap and the new vegetable soap, and most could not tell the difference. Two preferred the vegetable soap, and only one preferred the tallow soap, but even they wrote, that the difference is very little. All in all, the response was positive.
I am quite proud of this (especially because I got told by some other soap producers, that they tried to copy our soap with just plant based oils, but were never able to succeed), and i hope that my customers will agree that performance has not been jeopardized. I know that tallow is special for shaving soaps but I hope my customers will see that it is possible to achieve the same performance without tallow.
Thank you for using Haslinger!
Best regards,
Andreas Haslinger
...I didn't even notice. Top notch performance as I was always used to. So no need to panic fine Sirs!
Earl Grey: Hot!