Victorian Shaving Soap Recipes

There is a huge variation in the methods of manufacture and preferred textures of shaving soaps during the Victorian Period.

Just for starters, have a look at these recipes:

The druggists hand-book of practical receipts of every-day use. By Thomas F. Branston, 1857 recommends an interesting shaving paste that uses eggs

or how about this one?

 The soap called for here is plain Castile, an all olive oil hard soap.

Or this set of recipes for shaving fluid in Cooley's cyclopaedia of practical receipts, by Arnold James Cooley 1864

These types of  formularies also talk about powdered soaps, and creamed soaps such as perle d’amande are also recommended as being popular. Soft soaps made with a potash lye get regular mentions, as in this example from  Acids, alkalies and salts: their manufacture and applications,by Thomas Richardson, 1863

‘The soap, which has become so thick it can hardly be stirred, is run off into frames and cooled. These soaps are generally perfumed but not coloured.’

Although it is made with a potash lye its unlikely to be a jelly like soap, traces of salts in lye sources not as pure as modern commercially prepared KOH will help harden the soap even in small quantities. Many other shaving soap recipes of the period call for a mix of lye sources to get the preferred texture.

A general treatise on the manufacture of soap, theoretical and practical by Hippolyte Dussauce (marvellous name that don’t you think?) writing in 1869 recommends for hard shaving soaps made by the cold process either 2:1 tallow to coconut oil, or about 1:1 in other formulations.

Cold process soap making is incidentally a method regarded by many soapmakers with some suspicion during the Victorian period due to the difficulty in exactly calculating lye to fat ratios in any given batch and the need to start with concentrated lye- it is interesting that it is today the preferred method for artisan soap makers and that we can very easily calculate the exact saponification values of fats to result in a mild soap. 

To our Victorian predecessors, it was usually much better to make a boiled soap starting with a weak lye and adding successively stronger batches then salting out the soap leaving the excess lye and the glycerine behind in the spent lyes underneath. At this point the glycerine was seen largely as a waste product, it is not until the turn of the century that its value in explosives is fully exploited and glycerine becomes often more valuable than the soap itself in commercial soapworks.
 

His recipe for Windsor Soap for Shaving is a good example of the use of both soda and potash lyes (NaOH and KOH to modern soap makers)

Scented with caraway, bergamot, petigrain, cloves lavender and thyme, the soap was sold in cakes of 2-4oz.


Just like today, tastes varied and the Victorian gentleman could choose from a fairly dazzing array of shaving preparations, from hard bar soaps, through cream pastes, powdered soaps, liquids and more exotic emulsions. 

I have barely even started on listing all the scents that were popular, let alone the packaging associated with shaving soaps. Those will have to wait for a separate post all of their own. In the meantime, I have recipes to try out!