[sg_]

The context is products to help with shaving. Here’s a video Understanding the Chemistry behind Wet Goods Used During a Shave

My understanding of the functions needed by the products is:

1. Cleaning — the stuff that needs to be cleaned off the face would include dead skin,
   salts from sweat, prior cosmetics, spills (food, beverages) etc.,
2. Hydrating the skin (make it plump and stretched out, spread the follicles) and hair (so it is engorged) — besides specialized hydrating products, drinking water, hot-wet towels (that add water on the surface and cause water to be brought to the skin and hair as sweat) and steam can help here,
3. Sealing the hydration (I think this is termed moisturizing) and making the skin slick/slippery
4. Creating a layer that would be scraped by the blade. This need not be foam/lather; it just needs to be a layer of slippery substance that is cohesive (does not drip).

For steps 2 to 4, I have been experimenting with essentially single ingredients:

• For (2), aloe vera on wet face
• followed by a thin layer of Argan oil (which makes the skin very slick and, unlike coconut oil, does not make the stubble stick to itself or to the skin);
• followed by jojoba oil.

The above concoction does allow me to shave — even just aloe vera on water followed by jojoba is very good for shaving. And I know, experimentally, that cleaning followed by jojoba does not help with shaving — aloe vera over water is required before the oil.

But I sure would like a better understanding of the interaction between the ingredients and the skin and stubble — for example, is the argan for (3) really helping in any way?

[sg_]

Belassi said:

… I think the question is silly and there is no logical cosmetic chemistry. I am sure that WD-40 will give you a transparent, lubricated, shaving experience.

If indeed “WD-40 [would give one] a transparent, lubricated, shaving experience”, your response of a picture of a WD-40 spray can would be relevant to cosmetic chemistry — but not to this post since this post is about shaving products applied on the face with a shaving brush.

Even if you could prove that it is impossible by the laws of Chemistry/Nature to have a product of the nature this post is about, it would be more meaningful to at least make that claim rather than just declaring that this post is not relevant to cosmetic chemistry.

Until I find that the desired product is not possible by the laws of Nature, I will attempt to invent one. And once I have done so, you can be assured that I would not be bothering you by consulting with you for product design.

[sg_]

Belassi said:

What’s the relationship between WD-40 and this topic?

[sg_]

LincsChemist said:

… You want something that foams up nicely for application but dissipates quickly, leaving behind a transparent lubricating layer. Is that right?

Not exactly. I just want something that can be applied with a shaving brush with the result of the application (possibly some seconds after the application) being a transparent layer suitable for shaving.

LincsChemist said:

 I’ve made some fairly decent non-foaming shave gels that are transparent and stay that way, or you could consider a shave oil, …

How are those products applied? By rubbing with hand or with a brush?

[sg_]

LincsChemist said:

Have you ever found a product that gives a transparent lather? If so, looking at the ingredients of that might provide a clue, but pretty much all foaming products I’ve ever come across form a white lather.

Good points. As context, I was using “lather” to mean just a layer — not necessarily a layer of foam. For example, one can apply a thick coat of paint with a brush — since the area being painted is large, one can afford to waste the product that gets trapped in the paint-brush. Shaving creams and soaps made for application with a brush can generate a lot of foam from a very small quantity of product, and so one can afford to “waste” any product left over in the shaving brush (some people squeeze the brush and apply the extracted foam by hand).

It seems foam is just lots of tiny bubbles — and when light goes through these bubbles the material looks white and opaque. So if lather is just foam, then it will be opaque.

I have not found any shaving product that can be applied with a brush to result in a transparent layer. All the layers that result from brush are foam.

There are some not-so-good shaving creams/soaps whose foam dissipates soon after application — so as they are being applied with a shaving brush, they are foamy and opaque; but shortly thereafter, the bubbles disappear and what remains is transparent. However, what remains from these products seems to be just a very thin layer of water. It would have been nice if the residue after the disappearance of the bubbles had been a thick, slick, transparent layer.