The plan this morning was to use Taylor’s rose shaving cream to for a nice, soothing Sunday shave after my defeat at the hands of the Feather DE blade yesterday. I always scurry back to Taylor’s rose cream after catching a beating from some over-aggressive razor, blade, or other shaving experiment. The rose cream always seems to calm and heal whatever skin irritation I’m suffering from.

The weird thing is, I’ve been told the Taylor rose has no actual rose oil in it — that the rose scent is actually synthetic perfume oil, which might as well be red dye #2 when it comes to possessing any soothing properties. I don’t know if this is really so, but I do know that this cream smells great, shaves like a dream, and always helps calm my skin down when I’ve caught a beating from a shave need to take it easy for a day or two.

As I said, I was going to use the Taylor today, but a houseguest was using the bathroom the rose was in, so it was a no-go. So I figured what the hell, let’s see if Cremo Cream is any good at a “shoulder to cry on” shave.

I prepped in the usual way — hot shower, left my face wet — and lathered up with a Vulfix #2235 and a dime’s worth of Cremo Cream. I’d already ditched the Feather blade from my Merkur HD razor, replacing it with a fresh Merkur Platinum blade. The Merkur blades are the sharpest my skin can take without redness, I’ve found.

I usually do three passes with the DE — with-grain, against-grain, and then a bunch of diagonal cutting on my neck and under my chin, to get my billy goat’s gruff as smooth as my cheeks. But today I just did the first two passes, and 86′d the extra cleanup pass. I also lightened up on the downward pressure when I was going over the areas on my neck where the Feather shave left red marks.

This Cremo is amazing. I got just as nice and comforting a “take it easy” shave with it as I usually do with Taylor’s rose cream. My neck looked and felt great. Now I’m thinking maybe I’ve been an idiot all this time for doing that third cleanup pass under my chin all this time, just to get baby’s butt smooth on that patch which nobody else will ever know is or isn’t smooth to the touch. My neck either looks good or feels good — it’s never both. So I either shave it smooth so I can faceturbate all day, caressing my own chin like a demented freak, or have it look perfectly smooth and clean to the world at large. My own pleasure versus not looking like weasels ripped my flesh.

The more I use Cremo Cream, the more it surprises and impresses me. Used brushless as it’s intended to be, it gives a shave every bit as good as when you use a brush and a traditional English cream. Last week I learned that it works even better when you use it with a brush. And today I got the kind of kinder, gentler shave I used to think only came from using Taylor’s rose. If only Cremo Cream didn’t have to smell like a pina colada, and instead came in more traditional scents like rose, lavender, lime, and yes, violet, this stuff could be the only shaving cream I’d ever want to use.