January 2006
16 posts
1 tag
Fusion 2: Aftermath
My face doesn’t look like this today.
It looks a bit beat-up. Because it is a bit beat-up. I have red bumps on the base of my neck around my Adam’s apple, and the surface of the skin under my chin is noticeably more rough and bruised than it’s been since, oh, I first tried a Mach3 Power.
When will I ever learn?
Listen to me and listen good: I will never, ever buy...
1 tag
Gillette Fusion
I tried Gillette’s new 5-blade Fusion razor over the weekend. Not the battery powered version — that’s for saps. No, I just tried the regular Fusion. Five blades on the shaving side, and an extra blade on the back for trimming around the sideburns/goatee/pubic mound or anywhere else five blades can’t quite spelunk.
I actually snuck out to CVS last Thursday to get a...
1 tag
Nancy Boychik Hard Shaving Soap
Ever since I started using Nancy Boy’s incredible shaving cream, I’ve become addicted to the brand’s signature scent of lavender, peppermint, and rosemary. It’s soothing and relaxing and energizing and stimulating and sensuous all at the same time, and it got me to thinking: why not enjoy this incredible scent in a hard shaving soap as well?
As it happens, Nancy Boy...
1 tag
The Once And Future Latherking
Slick lather at last! Slick lather at last! Thank God Almighty, slick lather at last!
A great man once said that. Me, this morning, when I finally got the kind of lube-happy goods I’d been led to believe this Latherking hot lather machine could deliver.
Turns out you do need to add some sort of slick-me-up to the tap water and shaving cream after all, despite what I’ve been told...
1 tag
Time Out
I admit it. The Latherking has not been filling my life with glee. The more I use this thing, the more I think it’s only appropriate for a professional barbershop, and totally useless for an at-home shavegeek scenario.
The problem is the lather. For all its vaunted ability to deliver instant hot lather anytime you press its button, the Latherking’s lather just isn’t as good...
1 tag
Further Adventures of the Latherking
So I’ve been dicking around with this Cambell Latherking hot lather machine, trying to get it to deliver the cream of my dreams.
On the surface, this mechanized beast couldn’t be simpler — you add water and a few fingers of old-school shaving cream (i.e. the stuff in the tub, not the pressurized can), press the button, and the motor churns it up and forces it out a heated...
1 tag
Hot Cream
I’ve wanted a hot lather machine ever since I was a kid. My dad had a Sunbeam (or a Schick, I can’t remember which) latherizer that accepted a can of shaving cream, and when you pressed the button on the top, out came hot lather. It was a miracle of 1970s technology. I can still remember him pumping me out a handful of hot lather — the smell of the lime foam haunts me to this...
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Lights Out
So I’m about to get in the shower so I can wash up and then catch a shave afterward with my new Latherking hot lather machine when the power goes out. And stays out. Beloved Wife and the kids are upstairs and light shines through the windows so everyone’s fine, but I’m in the downstairs bathroom, my bathroom, where all my crap is in the medicine cabinet, where there’s no...
1 tag
Best. Episode. Ever.
I’ve been waiting for the Homer-eats-the-fugu-sushi “Simpsons” for seemingly forever, just for this scene.
Of all the Simpsons shaving gags over the years — Homer shaving his back, shaving his face while high on medicinal marijuana and spurting geysers of rainbow-colored blood from his nicks, Patty’s transvestite fiance getting outed when he’s discovered...
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New School
I’m getting emails about these so-called “new school” shaving creams I’ve been championing lately, like Nancy Boy and Truefitt & Hill’s Ultimate Comfort. Guys want to know if their favorite mall cosmetic counter crap is as good as these two new shaving creams, so they can breathe a sigh of relief and feel better about having paid 30 clams for a plastic tube of...
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So It’s Come To This
One of the weirder corollaries of starting down the wetshaving path is the newbie’s olfactory “coming out”. Straight, conservative, repressed Midwestern men to whom Old Spice is about the wackiest scent they’d ever consider wearing suddenly find themselves rutting naked through fields of lavender and violet like horny satyrs. The simple act of switching from a drugstore...
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Hear O Shavegeeks
Due to popular demand, I’ve restored the full and sacred text of Shaveblog, from the very first post to the one you’re reading now. Blogger seems to be working fine again, knock on woodgrain, so I’m going to see if it’ll stay ship-shape if I leave the full and sacred text on the main page. If it balks at re-publishing the full and sacred text every time I add a new entry...
1 tag
Wee Scot (Slight Return)
After I shaveblogged recently about Simpson’s itsy-bitsy Wee Scot shaving brush, the famed Flying Dutchman, the infamous Netherlander brush collector, taunted me from afar by posting a photo on a shavegeek forum of his Wee Scots, one current and one vintage:
To my utter dismay, the Dutch Boy’s vintage Wee Scot is even smaller than my new Wee Scot — a full half-inch smaller....
1 tag
Truefitt & Hill Ultimate Comfort Shaving Cream
I hate Vegas — god, how I hate Vegas — but I love the Forum Shops at Caesar’s. Specifically, the new multi-level wing they just put in a little over a year ago. If ever Vegas had a mitigating factor, this is it.
There’s Il Mulino, the best restaurant in Vegas (after Baja Fresh), and Vosges Chocolates, and Penhaligon’s, the venerated British perfume house with the...
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Expert Advice
So I tried a new barbershop this week, an old-school Italian place in our downtown. The kind of place where grown-ups get $15 haircuts, elderly Italian customers are never charged and are told to give their regards to Don somebody (I didn’t catch the last name), and no dance music is heard unless you enjoy dancing to Connie Francis and Mario Lanza.
For years I’ve been going to salons,...
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The Mystery Midget
“So what’s this mystery midget brush you’ve been using lately?” demanded the Fisher King, my men’s toiletry dominatrix.
I call him this because he delights in torturing me with a never ending supply of product recommendations, some so expensive I writhe in pain ($47 French shaving soap!) (okay so I gave in and bought a couple of bars of the maker’s olive oil...