Home Brew Shaving

By necessity, ingenuity, or good ol' stinginess, does anybody use unorthodox household supplies (soaps creams etc.) to shave with?

On occasion I'll use liquid hand soap, shampoo or conditioner as a pre-shave.

Before he passed away, my dad took to using liquid dish soap to lather up as shave cream. He liked to microwave it for 10 seconds to heat it. He did this because he could no longer get the Palmolive in a tube that he had shaved with most of his life.

 

I used unlathered baby shampoo once when traveling. It does a surprisingly good job. Hair conditioner can also be used successfully, except that it tends to clog the razor.

 

Any tallow based body or face soap will do a passable job in a pinch.

 

I tried liquid hand soap once. It worked ok. Nothing to brag about and I wouldn't do it again unless I had no other options. It couldn't have been good for my pampered skin, but using it once in a blue moon probably doesn't matter.
- Bax

 

As long as there is shaving soap available, as long as I have shaving soap in the house (and I have 100+ pucks of VdH Luxury and Deluxe in the closet), I've no need or desire to try anything not formulated for shaving my face.

But that's me.
It's your shave. Enjoy it your way.

 

I was tricked and only came in for the beer........

 

I decided to try brewing water kefir today. Does that count?

 

I've used different types of soap in the past when I was out of shave cream or when I was in a hurry. Bar soap worked pretty good, liquid, not so. Didn't try for BBS, DFS was good enough.

 

Dial hand soap will get the job done.
Unflavored Listerine is an alright after shave.
Witch hazel with toner in it is an alright aftershave. It also takes menthol well.
I can lather creams and any soap I’ve tried without a brush pretty quick.
Any moisturizer is a balm.

 

Iirc Listerine was originally marketed as an aftershave not a mouthwash.

 

Somebody told me that a while back. That’s why I tried it. It’s not as nice as a lot of the stuff from artisans, but it’s not bad either.

 

So long as you don't mind smelling like Listerine.

As an additional trivial fact, it was named for dr. Joseph Lister who discovered that washing your hands before performing surgery was a really good idea if you wanted the patient to live.

 

Truly a lister of all trades!

 

Long before I discovered wet shaving (and associated products) I shaved my head many times (in the shower) with hair conditioner and a Gillette Mach III

 

My wife gets foaming hand soap for each of our bathrooms from Bath and Bodyworks. Often they're nice scents so I'll sometimes add a squirt or two to the top of my shaving puck as I'm making lather.

 

Whoever approved that add should have been fired.

 

I would think twice about that. Unlike shave soaps liquid hand soaps have a lot of detergents in them to prevent soap scum from forming in the sink. These also tend to strip away fats in your shave soap (tallows, nut oils, etc.) that you want to leave on to condition your skin.