Lye soap for shaving?

[mladenius]

In a place where I live you can buy this kind of soap on a freshmarket. Some people from the countryside are also make it, usually with lard. There are unscented and smell, well like a soap without scent.
I have one of these soaps at my home. It's great for degreasing the skin and people usualy use them to clean their hands if they are very dirty. I would not recommend it for shaving or bathing for that matter because it could be very drying to the skin. It could work though if you have oily skin and because lather is fairly slick although not very rich.

 

[blethenstrom]

In a place where I live you can buy this kind of soap on a freshmarket. Some people from the countryside are also make it, usually with lard. There are unscented and smell, well like a soap without scent.
I have one of these soaps at my home. It's great for degreasing the skin and people usualy use them to clean their hands if they are very dirty. I would not recommend it for shaving or bathing for that matter because it could be very drying to the skin. It could work though if you have oily skin and because lather is fairly slick although not very rich.

That's cool. I make my own lard and other fast soaps and yes they can be dying if very little or no fat is left over in the sapponification process. If you, which you should do, leave some fat left over it will not be drying nor harsh but very mild for the skin.

 

[GR5233]

KOH you can extract as home by leaching water through wood ashes, but you really don't have control over the amount of lye in the solution. This is where the rumor comes from that lye soap are harsh on the skin. They didn't control the amounts to the level we can now do it and you ended up with left over lye in the soap which makes the soap caustic/alkaline.

It’s also where the advice of not using soap on cast iron because it will strip off the seasoning comes from. Another factor in having too much lye in soap back then is that they didn’t have a good way to determine how much NaOH and/or KOH was needed to convert a given amount of fats/oils into soap

 

[blethenstrom]

It’s also where the advice of not using soap on cast iron because it will strip off the seasoning comes from. Another factor in having too much lye in soap back then is that they didn’t have a good way to determine how much NaOH and/or KOH was needed to convert a given amount of fats/oils into soap

Absolutely correct! They did not have the nice SAP value tables for the different fats that we have nowadays.