Zartgefuehl aka Zartgefühl Men’s Secret German Vegan Artisanal Shaving Soap | 200ml ~6.7 oz Net Product | Made in Germany LAST PIECE IN-STOCK FOREVER? (I dunno if she’s only gonna make “#2” scent from here on, u can tell her anything u like…u just can’t tell her what to do ;-)

$3.12$25.00

Zartgefuehl Men’s Secret Shaving Soap 200ml | Quietly, Is This Earth’s Most Special Shaving Soap? {for its pH w/o post-saponific additives} | Made in Germany

SKU: zartmensscrtsoap200ml Categories: ,

Description

Dedicated Western hemisphere soapers (and there’s countless thousands judging by the forums, all presumably dedicated to American artisans whom do not undergo any of the very stringent EU stability/allergen testing requirements to bring soaps to market) should be pleased we stock this extreme enigma, perhaps the biggest outlier in all of latherfueldom; a low volume ‘PITA’ fuel which one can still come to adore.

At this shop, there’s nothing quite the same as Zartgefuehl, and it is neat that you can’t decide if that’s a good or a bad thing.   No higher praise can come than this; since this latest reformulation, we’ve sold now a “re-up” to more than sixty apparently happy (and e-quiet, for you NEVER read about this thing in the forums!) shaving men.   It is special soap, without question.  Read that testimonial picture; the customer had just bought two tubs of this stuff the week prior.

Zartgefuehl’s Men’s Secret’s an entirely different formulation from the mind unlike any other, now employing no potassium as an alkaloid and eliminating the use of palm oil or stearic acid.   No Zartgefuehl soap’s ever used tallow – this soap’s fats are exclusively shea butter, coconut oil, and cocoa butter.   The first ingredient is Sodium Shea Butterate, meaning wholly saponified shea butter, not shea butter that’s added post-saponification with another (cheaper) fat as the primary!  In fact, all the shea butter here has been saponified with alkaloids!  Some old French shaving soaps have done this, and still do, but to my knowledge have never been imported to the USA, you can get them here and there in France and perhaps the greater EU but they’re way under the typical shaving enthusiast’s radar.  I’d fancy a go at shaving with this Jordanian soap from Whole Foods just because it has SSB as item #2, but batting leadoff is regular old saponified palm, so while still special, it isn’t anywhere as exotic as this stuff.

In spite of the extreme oddity of the Sodium Shea Butterate base, it is a decently hard soap physically speaking.  It isn’t milled, and thus not the cheapest to run on a per-use analysis, the way that pretty much any milled soap will dominate.  Its ~0.6g/session consumption rate is respectable, not the true economy of triple-or-quadruple-milled soap, but after your finished expense of paying the ~high acquisition fee it work out to approximately $0.12 per shave with an average size shaving brush. The average American “croap” soap costs MUCH more per use to operate, even if the “buy-in” numbers are similar!

Because of that shea basis, this soap’s finished pH – without post saponification additives to skew that number – is just 8.5, an absolutely remarkable figure.  Through trade secrets of production, the solution retains fats which normally separate to the top of the cauldron, resulting in a finished product that allows your skin to feel softer after the shave than anything you’ve tried, WITHOUT the use of heavy fats and butters that are added to the ‘artisan’ American “croaps” to counteract what is at the core much more alkaloid finished products, and which very much in this opinion change the during-the-shave feel. There’s no heavy feel after the shave, no dryness…only soft skin.  The mellow feel of the shea butter during the shave is, well, remarkable.  It might remind you of the consistency of extremely whipped butter; the coconut oil gives it the slightest hint of shaving soap bubbles required, but it is never going to be a bubbly-creamy huge lather, and that’s sort of the point.

Ah, the use of this soap…well, to quote Hoagie, it isn’t easy.  Use VERY LITTLE WATER with this soap; if your brush is too wet or if you introduce too much water to your water/soap/air combination it just makes airy bubbles of no shaving use which collapse in short order.    I’ve used this palm-free formulation hundreds of times now, and it has become my all time favorite soap for the feel during and after the shave…at its best, the lather is low height and like spreading yogurt with a spatula.   It isn’t Hitton wet or Bourbonnaise slippery, but it isn’t awful, and of course has that lowered pH which can help many skin types.   Just like any cold-saponified soap, stability/volume/cushioning are poor.   This isn’t for the kids that need those shaving crutches – it is for those who will devote every effort toward how well their skin can feel afterwards, without feeling heavy or greasy.  It works well without needing terrific stability or coverage, because it never really gets super fluffy in the first place.  I know, that’s odd.

Don’t be too scared.  If you start with a badger brush that has been soaked deep to its core and then squeezed out of all the water you can manage to take from it, so that just the water content retained within the badger hairs themselves is present, this ideal way to load this soap to the brush can certainly perform…when it becomes pasty all over the head of the brush, take this to the face, and sprinkle a few DROPS of water in to the brush at a time to add to the face to achieve its ideal consistency.   Literally some drops, that’s it!

This soap contains talc, which influences its odor; smells more like fine English talc than it does its base fragrance of essential oils to me. The “Men’s Secret” scent is present, of course, but it will be much more apparent in the aftershave balm.    Among them, if you want to experience that pure delicious odor, the facial serum is the most true to what was presented to us in Germany at the cabinet of EOs.  There is a light citrus fragrance here with a hint of talc, and I miss the earth-and-sandalwood-odor palm-and-goat’s-milk version of this stuff from a few years ago for the odor (which apparently came from an ingredient now EU-eschewed so she had to reinvent the fragrance profile), but this version’s post shave is unequivocally superior.

This is a wholly vegan soap.   Handmade in Germany.

Additional information

Weight 6 oz
Dimensions 4 × 4 × 1 in
Sample or Whole

~10g Sample, 200ml Tub