Can You Shave With a Bar Soap? I Tried Bombshell Suds Co.'s The Dude

Hey everybody. John Bonham here, Cape Cod Wet Shaving. Coffee today is Wicked Wolf from Ravens Brew. Dark roast, berry and chocolate notes, a little nutty. Very nice. Go check them out.

I’ve been wanting to do this video for four or five years and kept putting it off. I know it’s been done before. But the timing finally lined up and I had a good reason to go for it. Today we’re finding out if you can shave with a small-batch artisan soap bar.

The Dude by Bombshell Suds Co.

The soap is called The Dude, from Bombshell Suds Co. at bombshellsudsco.com. If you know anything about the name, you know the movie. One of my all-time favorites. First film I made my now-wife sit through when we started dating. She thought it would be stupid. She wound up loving it. We watched it again last autumn.

Justin runs Bombshell Suds Co. with his wife. They’re dual-veteran owned and family operated out of Arkansas. Newer to the scene. Justin announced a beard balm on Instagram recently, and since I’m always nudging new artisans to look into shave soap, I left a comment saying so. He came back and said he was pretty sure their soap bars could be shaved with. So I went to find out.

What’s in This Bar

The label on The Dude shows beef tallow and coconut oil up front, with shea butter and castor oil alongside, then clay, honey, beeswax, and activated charcoal. Coloring throughout uses cosmetic grade skin-safe colorants. The bar looks genuinely cool.

Beef tallow is my preferred base. Tried and true, been around for centuries. My wife thinks tallow causes her to break out, so she goes vegan. I get that. For me, if I can get tallow, I’m getting tallow.

Clay is in there, which isn’t my personal preference for shave soaps. A lot of shavers treat it as filler. It does help with slickness. Some report it can load up on a blade over multiple passes. Worth knowing, not a concern that stopped me here.

The honey is the interesting part. No stearic acid on the label, and honey does a lot of the same work for lather. I’ve shaved with other honey-based soaps. They run firm because of the beeswax, but the lather comes up creamy and full. I was optimistic going in.

The Cheese Grater Technique

I want to walk through the setup because not everyone has seen this approach.

I’m not a good scooper. I go too light and I’m adding more soap throughout the shave, or I go too heavy and I’m rinsing paste off the bottom of the bowl afterward. With a bar soap or any hard puck, I use a cheese grater. I grate what I need into the bowl, tamp it down, and I’m off. If I need more, I grate a little in. Less waste, more control.

The soap sticks to the underside of the grater a bit. Just tap it with your finger and it falls right out.

Today I’m tamping with the SR1 soap spoon that Andy was kind enough to send over. It’s got a scoop on one end and a rounded tamp on the other. Stands upright on its own, and doubles as a tamper. Good tool. Look it up on Instagram if you want one.

For the shave itself: a Merkur 23C with a brand new Astra blade. I went mild on purpose. If the lather wasn’t going to cooperate, I didn’t want an aggressive razor in the mix. Brush is a Beehive Omega Boar.

How the Shave Went

Short version: better than I expected.

The lather came up fast. I loaded the brush and it was off to a good start inside two minutes. My real question was whether it would hold through the shave or thin out. It did thin a little. A bit of extra water pulled it back. By the end it had actually thickened up more than I expected.

There were some chunks of soap in the bowl from the grater. That’s the trade-off of the technique. A finer grater would cut that down. It didn’t cause any real problems during the shave.

Scent notes on The Dude are Whiskey, Coffee, Vanilla. Loading the brush, I got more of the coffee than anything, with the whiskey and vanilla underneath. I paired it with Avon Wild Country aftershave. Wild Country is a masculine fougere: coriander, basil, bergamot, lemon, geranium, tonka bean, vanilla. Heavier on the musk side. I thought it would work against the whiskey-coffee-vanilla on the soap. I think it did.

Could the shave have been slicker? Yes. A dedicated shave soap is going to beat a bar there. But those ingredients kept things from going dry. Three passes, no irritation. Still want Justin to look into making a proper shave soap, because if the bar is this capable, a shave-formula version would be something.

If you want to try this without the grater, there’s an easier way. Just rub the bar directly on your stubble, wet your face, and build a lather with your hand or a brush. The stubble catches the soap the same way a brush would. Great for travel.

The Verdict

Justin said the bar soap could be shaved with. He was right. He knows his ingredients. The lather held, the skin stayed comfortable, and the bar only cost $9. Dual-veteran owned, family operated, small-batch. Check them out at bombshellsudsco.com. I’m planning to order more.

I’ll also put in a word for Sir Hair, who made the first artisan bar soaps I ever tried. Their Gambler is worth a look if you haven’t been down that road yet. And there’s a dedicated shave soap bar called Nulo I’ve used for this same purpose. Nulo dissolves a lot faster and builds lather cleanly. Worth highlighting in a future video.

Thanks for watching everybody. Happy shaving.