Question to the soapmakers

...I really don't know how some people deal with hundreds of soaps...

They post a lot usually.

...I really don't know how some people deal with hundreds of soaps...

They post a lot usually.

That there is funny!

With a large supply of soap, you do not need to think about where and how to buy the soap that you want to use now. You just need to reach out and take it off the shelf. Ha ha ha

If you shave twice a day, head and face, use large brushes and load heavily, then 100 soaps doesn't necessarily seem like a lot.

Will from Barrister and Mann has suggested several times that people don't bloom his soaps, this also applies to other artisan soaps.

I was about to mention it too and tag Barrister_N_Mann !

Yep, blooming soaps our soaps is strongly contraindicated. I won't speak for other manufacturers but, for us, the soap is soft enough that you gain nothing by soaking the top layer (which effectively liquefies it) and you dramatically increase the internal moisture content, which, in turn, increases the risk of microbial growth. Soap is not normally a particularly hospitable environment for microbes, but, if you dilute it enough and provide enough moisture, they'll overcome anything eventually.

So yeah, please don't bloom it. Just shave with it and let it dry. It will be fine.

I personally am not a fan of blooming, simply because I do not like the idea of introducing so much moisture into the tub.
I prefer overloading with a damp brush till I get a very pasty brush head and go on from there.

I agree with Nikos, above. I may bloom a hard soap for the first few shaves but never a softer soap. Most of the artisan soap makers have added many materials to their soap resulting in the soap being somewhat softer. The purpose of adding water to the soap is to soften it so you can load it easier onto your brush. I am also finding that I tend to use at most three soaps in a rotation so that the soap never gets too hard and is always easier to load.

In my opinion blooming a soap is not needed with any quality soap. It should be saved only as a last resort for soaps that are unusable otherwise. I've seen threads where people are complaining that they got less than ten shaves from a tub of soap that should likely have lasted a month to two months. You can probably guess that they were blooming the soap.

Think about it if you've ever left a bar of bath soap soaking in some water for an extended period of time when you pick it up in your hands you can feel the outer 1/4 inch layer of soap leave the bar and the bar is now much smaller. You've used about 20 times the amount of soap that you needed and 90 percent of it is washed down the drain. That's pretty much what you're doing to your shaving soap when you bloom it. Basically picking up way more soap than you could possibly need for a normal shave. Sure the shave will be rather nice and it'll be easy to lather but you can get just as nice or a lather by lathering a quality soap the normal way.

For me, if a soap is so bad that I have to bloom it to get decent results then I'd rather use something else instead.

Experimented with blooming but found no reason to do so even with very hard soaps. I just load them until it feels right and lather on up. If it takes a bit more time, shoot, who cares. I'm enjoying the process. (That and my wife used to insist on using the soap dish in our past home shower and that bar of Dove was always a slimy mess. It would last two or three days though. Hahahaha). Her shower now has a soap rack and her bar dries out between uses. She noticed right away how long the soap later and she never complained once about it taking a long time to use it. I find my pucks to be the same. Keep them dry would be my mantra. As far as whether to load out of the tub or to scrape some into a bowl, that would be your choice but for me I like loading and pretty much building the lather on the puck and enjoy the wasteful use of soap in a luxurious manner. Load in the tub for me!

I’m 100% in agreement with what Will at B&M said in his post introducing .more in a soap especially if it’s in a plastic jar can accelerate micro bacterial activity and cause more than a few problems like orange spots, the soap going rancid, diminishing the scent and as dfoulk mentioned in his post faster
deterioration of the soap which results in wasting a percentage of the soap in the tub. I know I won’t recommend doing it with my shave soaps when my website is up.