Shaving Foam | Ingredients With George Zaidan (Episode 3)

[Applause] What's in here? What's it do? And can I make it from scratch? It's a inside ingredients.

First things first, these are not shaving cream; they're actually shaving foam. Shaving cream is more like face cream, and that deserves its own episode as does shave gel and shave soap. But today is all about this guy.

Now, the truth is many of you could probably shave your face with just water. You would, though, have to soak your beard hair for a good 2 minutes because that's how long it takes for the hair to get hydrated and soft—about 30% softer than normal. But all of these make the shaving experience nicer and easier. Shaving products lubricate the interface between skin and the sharp blade, and some people say they help keep beard hairs wet during the shave.

So why use one of these over another? Honestly, it's just personal preference. The cream and the gels tend to be a bit thicker, so if you have a thick beard, that might be for you. Whereas the foams and the soaps tend to wash off a little bit easier. Foam, in particular, is convenient. I mean, it comes out of the can already lathered up, so you just stick it on your wet face and you're off shaving.

Now, the two bestselling shave foams in the US have basically the same ingredients. This one has BHT, which is a preservative; this one does not. They both have fragrances, and it's actually kind of amazing how different the fragrances are. This one is somewhat like a locker room with wood cleaner, and this one sort of has a citrus leather type smell—shockingly different!

Anyway, aside from water, the essential ingredients can be split up into five types. The first is a lubricating soap; in this case, triethanolamine stearate. Now, tea stearate, which you can think of as steric acid's chemical cousin, is responsible for making all that lather, which reduces friction between the razor blades and your face.

The second category is the foam boosters—LTH 23 and sodium lauryl sulfate—which help make all that lather extra creamy. The third category is the fragrance, and the fourth is the preservative; in this case, BHT, an antioxidant that helps prevent the can from corroding. Now, the last group of ingredients are the propellants, specifically isobutane and propane, which are both flammable and explosive. So whatever you do, do not dust it! Just kidding—at reasonable temperature and pressure, this will not combust because there's not nearly enough isobutane and propane to make this whole thing flammable.

In fact, I could take a lighter to it, and as you can see, it does not combust. But you should still not try this at home because this can is under pressure. Now, you might be wondering why there are propellants in shaving foam. Well, it's what makes the foam a foam.

Now, foams in general are formed when pockets of gas get trapped in a solid or a liquid. Inside our can here, we have the first four ingredients I showed you; there are also the propellants, which are gases at room temperature and pressure. So you'd expect that they'd sit above the liquid since they're less dense. But the whole can is pressurized at 2 to 4 times atmospheric pressure, which ends up liquefying some of the propellant, meaning it actually dissolves in the soapy mixture below.

When you press this button, the propellant gas at the top expands, pushing the liquid down, which in turn pushes it up through the straw, out the nozzle, and into the world. Now, here is the absolutely insane part: remember that the soapy mixture coming out of the nozzle that has some liquefied propellant dissolved in it, and when that liquefied propellant hits our atmosphere, it turns back into a gas, which gets trapped in the surrounding liquid, creating bubbles—billions of them!

Now, those bubbles are way smaller than anything you'd get if you just lather up with soap or use one of these air pump hand foaming things, and it's the tininess of the bubbles that gives shaving foam its structure. Now that we know what's in shaving foam and how it works, I'm going to try and make my own from scratch using only natural ingredients. I'm going to start with the exact same ingredient you find in commercial shave foam—stearic acid—which I'm going to react with sodium hydroxide, and that will get us stearate, which hopefully will produce a rich, creamy, lubricating lather.

Both of these, by the way, you can get from nature, and sodium hydroxide can be a bit dangerous, which is why I'm wearing safety gear. I'll also use this natural soap as a foam booster because it foams up real nice. For fragrance, I'm using rosemary essential oil, and because I don't want to be dealing with pure concentrated flammable gases, I'm going to use nitrous oxide as my propellant. I'm going to use this whipping cream canister to dispense my foam.

So let's get [Music] [Applause] started. [Applause] This is getting slimy, which is a good sign for a lubricating soap—nice and tight. Now we charge it; let's give it a shake.

All right, moment of truth, huh? Hey, that's not bad! It did foam up; I can see the bubbles, and it's not quite as structured as the commercial foams. I would guess that my stearate concentration is probably too low for that. But let's now see how this actually performs on my face. Now, I didn't soak my beard hair, so this is probably going to hurt. But for [Music] science!

Yeah, by the way, this smells amazing! This is really not bad at all. This shaving foam is performing—ooh, smooth! Hey, very well! I am—I'm impressed! I would give this an 8 out of 10.

Now, if you guys have ideas on how to improve this recipe, let me know in the comments. If you have an idea for an episode, hit me up on Twitter, and in the meantime, I'm going to finish shaving.