I'm looking for advice on shaving cream pits. I was wondering if anyone knew about how may cans of shaving cream it would take to fill a small to mid size kiddie pool? How long before a shoot should you fill the pool? Will it lose it's fluff after a while? Also, how can you make a brown shaving cream pit to look a bit like mud? Would something like liquid water color work?

It depends on a lot of things. What's the diameter/depth of your pool? How thick do you want the layer of shaving cream to be? if you literally want to fill it to the point where it's almost overflowing with the stuff, you're probably talking hundreds of cans. The largest I ever went was 50 cans in a 50 gallon rectangular tote like for storage, and that only filled the thing up a little over halfway. Granted once you're in there your body displaces a lot of it and it looked and felt plenty full (and awesome), but it proved that 1 can doesn't even amount to 1 gallon, more like 1 liter. If you add water you can increase the coverage area significantly, but add too much water and it dilutes the foam too much, therefore losing the creamy texture.

What also affects the texture is time. I found that after an hour of being out of the can the stuff really starts to lose it's initial feel and starts to become more sudsy, and I spent the first half hour just getting ready. Adding water half way through the session would be the best way to prolong it's use, but if you don't have enough helping hands with getting the stuff out of the cans you can easily lose half of your session time just getting ready. Someone suggested wood clamps a while ago on the forums for saving thumbs (and time).

Below I attached some pics of two different videos that are favorites of mine and the pools are different. The first one is Heather from WTFdownloads with just shaving cream and the other is Jayce when they added both water and color (and it was sooo awesome!). Is the the pool that you have like either of these? Hope all of this helps and good luck!

I filled half a tub to a reasonable depth last Thursday using only 27 cans - I deliberately made a mound in one half of the tub, so that I could slide in the other end head first and then push my way up into the foam. That worked well and gave about one and a half feet deep foam. So I suppose 50 cans might fill a tub, but be careful cos some paddling pools actually have a larger capacity than a bath tub.

I didn't dilute my foam at all, and climbed in literally as soon as I'd finished pumping it all out, so it was still very thick and incredible.

Even though I only filled half the tub, there was more than enough mess as after writhing around in it for a bit, you soon got completely covered and there was enough foam to completely cover my legs when I was sitting in the bath...

Strangely I found that beyond a certain point you actually couldn't feel the difference between a small amount of foam on your body and a large pile. When you're completely covered in foam, there's not really anywhere else to go from completely covered!! Amazing experience though and well worth a go.

The foam does definitely start to thin out after about an hour - slowly at first but gradually loosing its thickness.

Ok, so here is a question that goes with this topic, how do you guys get large quantities of cans of shave cream? I always end up breaking up to stores local to me, but I HATE that look I get when I am buying like 3-4 cans at a time. Is there a way to buy the good stuff (Barbasol) in large quantities online? Oh and not spend a fortune in the process.

I used to feel so uncomfortable about buying shaving cream in a grocery store that I would buy other stuff with it like new razors and toothbrushes! I was buying 3-4 cans at a time like you said and eventually I realized that the convenience of buying a bunch at a time definitely outweighed my concerns of what others where thinking. The funny thing is even though I buy much more now (8-12) per store I don't feel comfortable with buying more than 12 for some reason! I guess that's the magic number for me lol.

I looked online and amazon will let you buy up to 30 Barbasol cans in one order, but it's $1.89 a can. I pay about $1.40 more or less at stores and I live in an area where I can hit up a dozen grocery stores in just a 10 mile radius, so I probably won't ever buy online now. If it really bothers you, just say it's for a science experiment or a youtube video or something.

You don't even need to say that. The majority of cashiers just wanna go home and get thru the day. I'm sure they don't care what you're buying. Besides, its not really really anybodys business anyway

Thanks for the input.

Yes! The green pit is exactly what I'm looking to do. The size of the pool is the same, but I want to fill the whole thing lol! Thank you for replying.

I once filled a 4 foot by 4 foot box fairly deep with 50 cans. The pool I see in your pictures would likely require 100 cans to get to be about 6 inches deep.