antdad said: Wooaaahhh. Thank's Henk.



It seems that many of my favourite soaps contain tallow/lanolin...DR Harris, Tabac, MWF, Palmolive etc. Is there a specific property that the inclusion of animal fat brings to a soap or is it just conjecuture that I seem to get my best shaves using them? Click to expand...

Tallow contains mainly stearic and palmitic acid, just as palm oil BTW. If you're restricted to making soap from fats/oils only, tallow, palm, and cocoabutter are the best choices for a good, hard, creamy lathering shaving soap. Tallow was traditionally the only one of the three that was readily available, so it is only natural that classic formulas are based on tallow. Now, once you have access to individual fatty acids (which come from hydrolysed fats and oils...), there is no real reason to still use tallow as main source of fatty acids, you can mix stearic acid, some palrmitic acid and some coco acids to get a soap that you would never be able to make from tallow alone. Using tallow is probably more playing to tradition than really necessary these days. Many commercial formulas have stearic acid and tallow, or even stearic acid and coco fatty acids as their main ingredients. I don't think there are commercial formulas that are tallow-only, although if you choose your fats/oils well and don't mind a softish soap, you can make a very good shaving soap without having to resort to single fatty acids / steari acid. Especially if you sneak in a little foam stabilizer...Henk