Shaveblog

Summer Shaving

Ahh, summer. Though it’s only 6/6/6 and we’ve still got two weeks and a day till the official start of summer, we’ve had a few days of searing, wavy-lines-off-the-sidewalk kind of heat here on the Forgotten Coast. And that can only mean one thing to inveterate Shaveblog readers:

It’s shaving season again!

Yes, Planet Shavegeek rejoices once more, as cruel, cruel winter recedes to her Stygian depths, taking with her the dry skin and the merely adequate shaves I’ve been putting up with lo these many months of frigid darkness, wondering, in private moments of despair, if the season-long string of partly crappy shaves meant that I’d— dare I even think it? — lost my way.

But today’s shave put that light-starved jibber-jabber to rest, because I finally got my ass in gear and made it over to the YMCA after, christ, a month at least of shameful torpor. It felt good to sweat like a pig again, to put in the hour of cardio and weights and then sit for awhile in the sauna, letting the sweat stream down from the top of my head and marinate my whiskers (that’s right — I always save my shave for the Y). I sit there in the steam room and rub my face, working the sweat into my beard, accelerating the process of softening up the hair for the kill. The other guys stare, sure, but out of awe, not discomfort. Definitely awe.

And then Lady Shave and I, we dance. Today I packed my dopp kit with my usual rig — a 1940’s Gillette Super Speed DE safety razor, an Israeli “no-name” Personna blade, and a Simpson Wee Scot badger shaving brush. But to celebrate the first day back at the gym after so long, and to make the most of this unseasonably hot weather we’ve been having, a tube of Firenze’s own Proraso shaving cream.

Proraso may be my favorite hot weather shaving cream. Chock full of skin-friendly eucalyptus oil and menthol, Proraso shaves as well as any of the high-end English creams like Taylor and Trumper, but it’s got this wicked-excellent ice cold smack at the end of the shave when you rinse your puss with cold water. Really, there’s nothing else like it on the market.

Today’s shave was the best I’ve had in months. Unless I’m dicking around with a new razor or cream and the whole thing goes out the window, my shaves have been consistently good since I started sticking to the Super Speed razor and the Israeli blades. This mild-mannered DE and these mild-mannered safety blades stand in stark contrast to the pinhead escapades on the shavegeek forums, where urinal cake salesemen from Modesto do that barking thing they do during Tim Allen concerts and wield manly, skin-peeling rigs like Merkur Slant Bars loaded with Feather Platinum blades, or Merkur adjustables cranked up all the way so you’re not shaving with a razor anymore, you’re shaving with a blade on a stick.

Hey, I play around with razors, too. In the last week alone I’ve shaved with the Merkur HD (still the best razor Merkur ever made), an all-metal Schick Injector I yoinked on eBay, a stick-shift knobbed Injector from the same yoinked lot, and even a hundred year-old Gillette DE Beloved Wife got me, which was sweet beyond words but kind of like Ferdinand giving Imelda another pair of shoes.

Shavetention Deficit Disorder keeps me from settling down with one true rig, but god help me, it’s the 40’s Super Speed — The Little DE That Could — that gives me the best, most consistent shaves. And no matter what other blades I try, I keep coming back to the Israelis as the best combination of closeness and comfort. If I’d known about these blades as a newbie, lots less blood would’ve been shed, let me tell you.

That said, there have been shaves these past few months that weren’t all that great. Good, but not great. Close, but not super close. Little patches of micro-stubble around the base of the neck I could feel with my fingertips, even if nobody else except Harvey could see it. I blamed myself, and lived with the shame, forgetting it was the winter blues that were limiting my shaves to those of a commoner.

Well, today marked the return of wetshaving as usual. A good workout to get the blood flowing and the face swelling, a nice sit in the sauna to open the pores and soften the whiskers, and that time-tested, money-in-the-bank combo of a Gillette DE, a Simpson brush, and Proraso shaving cream.

When it’s hot outside, I’m more than willing to put up with Proraso’s not-terribly-shavegeek-swooning scent (think Vick’s Vapo-Rub pulling a train with Noxzema and Hall’s Mentho-Lyptus) just to get that spectacular shave and the bracing cooldown at the end that lasts for a nice long while. Used to be you could only find Proraso at Italian markets, or online from the usual suspects. Now Target (!) of all places stocks it, making it even easier to pick up a $10 tube of this insanely great Italian marvel.

Get Musgo Real

Chasing the elusive 5-minute quickie shave lately, I’ve been revisiting some old favorite shaving creams that work especially well without a brush, just slathered on with your bare hands like a heathen. And it occurs to me that I’ve never really blogged about one of the very first high-quality shaving creams I tried back when I first picked up a Merkur safety razor to give this whole wetshaving trip a go: Musgo Real.

It was Lee Cantor of Lee’s Razors who first turned me onto Musgo. I’d put in an order for my first Merkur HD razor and a pack of blades, and Lee recommended I try a tube of Musgo — he said it was one of the best shaving creams in the world, and that it would leave my skin nice and moisturized. I figured it was worth a shot at only ten clams a tube, so I bit.

Musgo Real “Creme Para Barbear” has been around since the 1920s, and this Portuguese shaving cream has become so popular with old-school wetshavers around the world that pretty much every shop and online vendor that deals in shavegeekery sells it — I mean, you can get it here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and even here for god’s sake. I’ve had vendors tell me they wouldn’t dream of not carrying Musgo, because many of their longtime customers won’t shave with anything else.

The cream comes in a nice metal toothpaste-style tube, with a cap that’s got a recessed point to pierce the seal when you first crack open a tube. And when you do open one for the first time, that’s when Musgo’s heavenly, grassy scent makes you smile. It’s been described by more than one scentgeek as smelling like fresh-cut grass, and it’s one of my favorite scents in all of shavegeekdom.

Musgo’s secret ingredient is lanolin. It’s a glycerin-based cream like the English types and the new-school creams like Nancy Boy and Lush, but it’s also got a healthy dose of lanolin to keep your skin slick during the shave and moisturized afterward. And you can really feel the difference, both during a shave and after you rinse off, when you shave with Musgo. There’s an extra bit of lube and cushion there as compared to the English creams — in this respect, it’s more like Nancy Boy and Truefitt & Hill’s Ultimate Comfort than the classic Trumpers and Taylors.

Musgo works well with a brush, but I’ve found that the lanolin can gum up a badger brush’s bristles with extended use, so I don’t really recommend using it with a brush. The good news is I find Musgo works even better brushless, just using your hands. You don’t get quite as thick’n’puffy a bed of lather on your puss, but to me, the shave is better and a hell of a lot quicker to boot.

I’ve been catching some excellent haul-ass shaves with Musgo this past week, revisiting an old favorite to see how it fared as a quickie cream. I’d forgotten how much I like this cream, both for its shave and its scent — not every shaving cream works well as a quickie cream, but Musgo joins Nancy Boy on my short list of shaving creams that can haul ass when the chips are down yet sacrifice nothing when it comes to the quality of the shave and the sniffpleasure, however brief.

Musgo Real is one of those classic shavegeek creams every guy should have a tube of laying around. It’s cheap, easy to source, smells great, is good for your skin, and is particularly excellent when used brushless. Like Proraso, if you don’t have some already, go online and buy a tube, now.

Shaveblog is One

Thanks go to Beloved Wife for reminding me that it was exactly one year ago today that I launched Shaveblog, and to young Petrovich for helping me put the icing on the birthday cake that is this blog’s move from Blogger to WordPress (the move also means Shaveblog’s RSS feed has changed, so you need to reset your subscription if you’ve been Atomizing).

It’s been a strange and interesting trip doing this blog. I started it on a dare to myself, to see if I could keep up a blog about a subject that couldn’t be less important, and now I find myself with 60,000 readers, profiles in the New York Times and London’s Financial Times, and just last week Women’s Wear Daily BeautyBiz named Shaveblog as the site with the largest readership in its list of the most popular “beauty blogs”.

So now I’m a beauty blogger.

“Daddy, what did you do during the war?”

“Well son, I was a beauty blogger.”

(long silence)

So anyway, as befits a toddler who’s outgrown his onesies, I felt it was time to move Shaveblog over to WordPress. Got a blog and you’re still on Blogger? STAY THERE! What a pain in the ass this was. Sure, things are great now that I finally taught myself CSS and beat on a poor WP template with both my fists like some demented ape until it looked kinda sorta like my old Blogger site. So anyway I made the move and WordPress is really, really nice, seriously, I’m loving it. But I do apologize for taking the week off to get things moved over to the new platform.

Okay, so where were we? Ah yes, the quickie shave.

I’m on a quickie shave kick lately.

It goes against everything formal shavegeekery stands for, I know. The whole point of ditching the Mach3 and canned goo and upgrading to a safety razor, shaving brush, and traditional English-type shaving cream is to slow your shave down. You get a much closer shave, it makes your skin look and feel great, and the whole experience just gets richer and more pleasant.

But the keyword is slow. Like the Europeans with their “slow food” campaign to return the act of eating a meal to a pleasurable, healthy pace from the current trans-fattened speedchow America exports to the rest of the world, wetshaving demands a more leisurely pace for the best results. Instead of haphazardly smearing goo on your puss and then hauling ass with a tri-blade, old-school shaving wants a man with a slow hand. It wants a lover with an easy touch. A man who will spend some time, not come and go in an easy rush.

So why am I obsessed with the quickie shave?

I’ll tell you why. Because I’m a dawdler. I wait until the last possible minute before I have to be somewhere, and then I go on eBay and check my auctions. I go to Nancy Boy and read Eric’s latest blog. I go to YouTube and watch great moments in rock history.

I dawdle till there’s no possible way I’m going to be on time, and then I go into full-on Lance Kerwin mode, when my boy starred in 1977’s “The Loneliest Runner”, a movie about a high school kid who grew up to be an Olympic marathoner because he wet his bed every night and his sadistic mom (a yeopersonlike DeAnn Mears) hung his sheets out of his bedroom window to dry so he had to run home every day after school to try to beat the school bus so he could rush upstairs and yank the sheets inside before the kids on the bus could see them (and let me just say this: I know this story was based on Michael Landon yes that Michael Landon’s real life, and I’m sorry his parents made him sleep in a crib till he was 15, but if a giant flaming meteor was screaming toward Earth and the only way to stop it was for my mom to hang urine-stained bedsheets out the front window of her HOME, well, sorry to break this to you but we’re all going to die).

This is my mindset when I’m behind the eightball but I need to shave. I become Lance Kerwin. If I don’t shave in under 5 mins, the car Beloved Wife and Treasured Offspring are driving home in is going to pull into our driveway and their eyes are going to slowly pan up to the sight of my pee-streaked bedsheets fluttering out the front window of our house, and that is when I run out the back door and keep running until I’m on a shrimp boat headed out to the Gulf with a new name (Wiley), a tweaker’s bony frame, and a dull roar between my ears.

That’s not going to happen, I tell myself. Not on this shave. Not today.

The first thing you have to do when you have to haul ass but still want a good shave is ditch the brush. Hey, it hurts me too — I love my shaving brush. Best part of the whole experience, bar none. But a shaving brush is the quickie shave’s worst enemy. So don’t even look at it. I don’t care if you just spent $65 on a Simpson Wee Scot or a Vulfix #2234. You’re in a whole other place right now. Your brush is dead to you.

And that means those delicious English old-school shaving creams like Trumper’s, Taylor’s, and Truefitt’s are dead to you as well. Because they don’t lather up nearly as well with just your fingers as they do with a brush. Since it’s fingers we’re dealing with when launching into a quickie shave, all those otherwise superb English creams are out (except for Truefitt’s new Ultimate Comfort shaving cream, which happens to lather really well without a brush and doesn’t really count as an English cream since it’s made in Canada).

The key to a really good quickie shave is the cream. It’s got to lather up quickly and thickly with just your hands smearing it all over your wet puss, and it also has to buffer your skin from the sped-up bladework you need to do if you’re going to get your two (okay, sigh, three) passes in under the 5-minute mark without some serious razor burn.

For awhile there, I always reached for Beloved Wife’s shower tube of Cremo Cream when I need to haul ass with a shave. She loves it for gam-shaving, and it’s excellent stuff for when you need to shave really quickly with a safety razor and still get that shavegeek-approved smoothness. I’m not crazy about Cremo’s Pina Colada scent, but ye gods does this stuff shave like a madman. With a brush or without, this is hands-down the slickest shaving cream I’ve ever tried. You forgive its fruity scent because it lets you haul ass and still look good.

Or at least you try to, anyway. I’m good with Cremo for a shave here and there, but I can’t use this stuff all the time. I just don’t care for that Pina Colada smell. Great product, wish the scent was different. So I’ve kind of taken Cremo off my quickie shave list. The older I get the more crotchety and picky I become. I need speed and good smell.

The Lush shaving creams are fantastic for quickie shaves, but I find they gunk up my razors quite a bit, and it takes longer than usual to rinse the blade clean after a shave. These wacky, tacky UK creams shave like nobody’s business, but since they take longer to clean off your blade, I don’t consider them quickie-approved.

I’ve gotten some amazing quickie shaves with the two budget-priced Euro creams I recommend every shavegeek own at least a tube each of — Proraso and Musgo Real. Italy’s Proraso, especially, just comes into its own when you squirt an inch into your palm and rub your hands all over your face — and its eucalyptus oil really wakes you up at the end of the shave when you rinse with cold water. I love Proraso to death and shave with it all the time, quickie shave or not.

Lately, though, I find myself wanting the best of both worlds. A quickie shave with the fewest compromises, scent-wise and otherwise. But mostly scent-wise. I love Proraso like a dog, but it smells more like something men used half a century ago when they weren’t supposed to enjoy the way their toiletries smelled.

It occured to me recently that Nancy Boy, currently my favorite shaving cream and the one I use most mornings, is one of those new-school, inherently wetter and creamier shaving creams that was meant to be used brushless, even though it lathers really nicely with a brush. Funnily enough, I’d never tried it with just my hands, because it worked so amazingly with a brush the first time I tried it that I just kept using it that way.

And so it was that on one fine morning not too long ago, I dipped my fingers into a tub of Nancy Boy for my first brushless quickie shave with this stuff. And let me tell you something, man and boy — it was awesome. Stupendous. Why haven’t I been using Nancy Boy for all my quickie shaves? It’s right there in the medicine cabinet, with my little Simpson Wee Scot brush and Gillette Super Speed sitting on top of it — my lean, mean, minimalist shavegeek rig.

I know it sounds stupid, but this is who I am — I consider it a major triumph that I finally grokked that Nancy Boy shaves just as well when you need to haul ass and just smear it on with your hands as it does when you take the time to fill your Moss Scuttle with hot water, let your badger brush soak in it, and then whip up the finest lather possible for a slow, languid, me-time wetshave.

Some days I don’t even need to rush my shave and I still like to ditch the brush, slap on some Nancy Boy, and Edward Scissorhands it. Perhaps, like Michael Landon, I will develop the kind of muscle memory that takes a humiliated bedwetter and turns him into a world-class beauty blogger.

Hedwig and the Optical Inch

Philips and Norelco aren’t brands known for edgy bathroom humor. The last time I attended the IFA show in Berlin, about the farthest out Philips was willing to go was dressing up several hundred German youth in orange lederhosen and matching Raggedy Ann and Andy wigs and making them all do Up With People style dance numbers — to introduce the company’s new line of DVD players.

Norelco, well — they make electric shavers. Is there anything more boring than an electric shaver? I’ve tried the best from Braun, Panasonic, and yes, Norelco, and got mediocre shaves that left my neck sore and red. My friend Mark swears by his electric, and damned if he doesn’t get a good shave from it. But I’ve had terrible luck with them.

That said, I admit I’m a total sucker for great advertising. And this viral video for Norelco’s new Bodygroom has me, inconceivably, teetering on the precipice of actually buying this @%#$ thing.

Click on everything, especially the music video. I can’t believe Philips and Norelco went along with this, but kudos, gentlemen. Please give us more.

Lush Life

And now for something completely different: Lush.

This UK brand of unabashedly girlie soaps, bath bombs, and haircare products has been flying under my all-seeing, all-knowing radar since it launched in 1994, probably because I’m not so much into $5 lacrosse ball-sized Bromo Seltzers scented with jasmine and ylang-ylang you dump in the tub to make fizzy-fizzy. I guess I’m just old-fashioned that way.

Of course, like many girlie brands these days, Lush has a handful of men’s shaving products, I guess for girlies to buy their boyfriends in the spirit of Queer Eyetc. and so they’ll quit leaving Edge can rust rings on the bathroom counter. With names like “Razorantium”, “Ambrosia”, and (I swear I’m not making this up) “Prince Triple Orange Blossom”, though, I’m guessing a girlie had better be hot and I’m talking about center of the Sun hot for a guy to drink a tub of that bathwater. It’s like when I bought Journey’s “Evolution” because my junior prom date liked them and I felt sure I could choke back the bile if that record could get me some lovin’, touchin’, and/or squeezin’ (no dice, and later I wound up hucking that vinyl so hard against a tree in our backyard I think Steve Perry felt a disturbance in the Suck Force).

Anyway, my friend Andy in the UK told me I needed to check Lush out, that their shaving creams were amazing. Normally, I’ll try anything Andy tells me is amazing — he is, after all, the coolest guy in England, as well as the man who invented the almighty Featherjector. Whereas the forum geeks’ love for a new product is usually a reliable sign it actually sucks, Andy’s one of a handful of guys whose opinion on matters of shavegeekery I take seriously. So I perused Lush’s US web site and called in some of their products to try.

I’m pretty sure I’m not quite the right demographic for the company’s bath bombs and fast-dissolving $7 bath soaps — the former fizzed up a storm in the kids’ bath (“Daddy, there’s ants in the tub!” my daughter squealed as the Golden Slumbers bath bomb left a bunch of little lavender twigs in the bathwater and made the whole house smell like candy), while the latter (Gratuitous Violets) literally dissolved in my hands within the space of two showers, leaving behind a spoor the likes of which no other scented product has ever marked my bathroom’s territory. Hey, my bad — I’m 2o years too old and one Y-chromosome too many for this kind of trip.

But the shaving creams…

First off, these Lush creams are totally different than anything else I’ve ever tried. They’re more like an aftershave balm you shave with than a traditional glycerine-based shaving cream. Both the Razorantium and the (I can’t even type this with a straight face) Prince Triple Orange Blossom come in 8-ounce tubs for $17-and-change. Which is good, because you use a lot more of this stuff per shave than you would an English cream.

Both Lushes are brushless, and I do mean brushless. The creams don’t lather at all, and they just sank into my Simpson Wee Scot brush like it was a black hole. You just wet your puss with warm water after a shower and then slather these Lushes on with your fingers, covering your face and neck. Then you shave.

And when you do shave, you will find something very curious indeed. Because these Lush creams, unlike every other shaving lube on the planet, don’t lube. In fact, they leave kind of a sticky surface on your skin and stubble. At first I thought I did something wrong, so I rinsed off the Razorantium and applied some PTOB. Same deal.

So you figure what the hell, and you bring a 1940’s Gillette Super Speed loaded with a 15-cent Israeli “Super+” DE blade to face, and you make your first stroke. And that’s when everything you know about wetshaving flies out the window.

Because this stuff works. I mean, it works like a goddamn miracle. I shaved with this stuff for a week and got a perfect, effortless shave every time. Shaving with a brushless, non-lathering cream that leaves a clear, tacky coating on your face takes some getting used to, but these Lush creams are, as Andy said they were, freakin’ amazing.

In keeping with the overall Lush trip of skin-friendliness/essential oils/etc., the Lush shaving creams are loaded with good stuff like almond oil, rose water, glycerine, and shea butter. But their secret ingredient is linseed mucilage, which is also a, um, laxative. Beyond its stickiness, linseed mucilage is said to have the curious ability to swell when it comes into contact with water, which may have something to do with why it gives the Lush shaving creams their crazy-excellent shavability.

Because of its brushless nature and amazing shave, Lush has become my new favorite quickie shaving cream, for when I absolutely have to shave in a minute flat without hating my crappy shave for the rest of the day. This stuff shaves like you also applied pre-shave oil, so even a rushed shave doesn’t irritate my skin. It’s the best quickie shave I’ve been able to pull off, by a long shot.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t really notice a difference in the shave between Razorantium and the Prince Triple Orange Blossom, and oddly enough, they smell so similarly that I don’t think I could tell them apart blindfolded. I prefer the Razorantium by sheer dint of its less asinine name, but you can’t go wrong with either of these Lush creams. They may be weird, wacky, and completely different from anything else you’ve ever shaved with, but they shave like nobody’s business, too, and serve notice that there’s more than one way to shave a puss.

Scuttlebutt

Part of the problem with shavegeeks is that most of the guys who’re into this trip don’t understand the difference between “classic” and “olde-timey”: Classic = using a hand-cranked churn and elbow grease to turn ice and rock salt into the kind of ice cream that makes you spit “feh!” the next time you taste store-bought. Olde-Timey = ordering the Pig’s Trough at Farrell’s and thinking that you’re somehow kickin’ your butterfat dollar old-school by patronizing a genuine turn-o’-the-century “Ice Cream Parlour” despite the fact that you’re eating Sysco instutional ice cream (same as inmates get) in a Japanese-owned chain restaurant that’s only been around since the mid-1960s.

Another straw—sorry, styrofoam boater-based example: Classic = King Oliver. Olde-Timey = every local “Dixieland” band, everywhere (extra points awarded for one or more members with round-rimmed glasses and if the banjo player’s got an electric pickup running into a Peavey Bandit and/or Roland Cube amp, and triple double bonus if (if?) the entire band also works at Farrell’s and in fact met there while running Pig’s Troughs out to the 8-tops while humming “Who Let The Dawgs Out?” on kazoos).

Which brings me to shaving mugs. Those cool-man Old Spice mugs from the ’50s aside, I’ve always felt icky about shaving mugs. They served a purpose and served it admirably back when lather meant whipping a wet brush over a cake of hard soap, but it’s 2006, and most men, even hardcore shavegeeks, use soft shaving cream. And if you shave with cream, you don’t need a mug.

What you do need is hot lather. Oh man do you need hot lather! Hot lather is why men fight wars, son. Not for democracy. Not for oil. We fight wars to decide who gets to shave with hot lather and who doesn’t. If you’ve never shaved with hot lather you won’t understand, and if you have, you do. Hot lather can only be had with a heater of some sort — no matter how hot the water is when you soak your brush, it cools off almost instantly the moment you start lathering cream on your face. Companies like Con-Air have been doing electric hot lather machines for use with canned foams and gels for ages now, but you know better than to shave out of a can, right?

The classic Lather King hot lather dispenser works with high quality shaving creams, but I hunted down one of these beasts to try and I have to say it’s not really worth the rigmarole. Yes, it makes hot lather, but the quality isn’t all it could be, plus you have to smear it on your face with your fingers, not a brush, and the heat disappears the moment the cream touches your skin. It’s there for a fraction of a second, and then it’s gone. You go to all that trouble and leave the @%#$ machine plugged in and running 24/7, and all you get is a few picoseconds of hot lather. Barbers use these things because they spew lather all day long on a tankful of cream, but for home use, they suck.

Recently, in an attempt to finally solve the problem of long-lasting hot lather, noted shavegeek Dr. Christopher Moss of Novia Scotia, Canada came up with a novel spin on the age-old “shaving scuttle” used with hard soaps:

A traditional shaving scuttle like the one pictured above has a shallow holder at the top for a cake of shaving soap, and a wide-mouth spout on the side for water and brush access. Men used to fill these scuttles with boiling water from a tea kettle, and then periodically dunk their shaving brush into the spout to heat it up before swirling it around on the soap resting in the receptacle on top. Works great with soap, not at all with shaving cream, because of the little drain holes beneath the soap that keep it dry between shaves. Use cream with a traditional scuttle and all the lather drips down into the hot water.

But what if there were no drain holes? And what if the front spout was done away with entirely, replaced with a mere slit of an opening for the hot water, to keep the cool air from cooling off the hot water inside the scuttle? Dr. Moss drew up some diagrams, faxed them to his friend the noted potter Sara Bonnyman, and the Moss Scuttle was born.

Now, I’m not a mug guy — I think I’ve made that abundantly clear at this point. But after using this thing for a week, I never want to shave without one again. It’s that simple. And here’s why you should buy one, too, immediately: warm lather. For the entire shave. Every time you raise brush to puss, the lather warms your skin and stays warm, and your last lathering is just as warm as the first. It feels so good I add an extra pass or two to my shave, which I don’t even need but who the hell cares — like Pia Zadora said in “Butterfly”, if it’s right, it’s good.

Here’s how you use the Moss Scuttle:

First you fill both the inner chamber (note the small spout) and the cup with hot tap water, as hot as your tap will get.

Then you let your brush sit in the water while you Q-tip your ears, slather your pits, splash warm water on your face, put your nipple rings back in, etc.

Dump the water out of the scuttle and refill only the inner chamber with hot water. The hot water inside the Moss Scuttle surrounds the cup and heats it for the entire shave.

Dap a small bit of shaving cream on the tips of your wet brush, and begin swirling it around in the Moss Scuttle — you should get an instant eruption of thick, rich lather that covers your brush.

That’s it. Lather your face and neck, and then return your brush to rest in the Moss Scuttle as shown, so the hot water inside the chamber keeps your brush and lather heated.

I love this thing — at $40 Canadian (about $35 USD), the Moss Scuttle’s a steal. Unlike the traditional scuttles which frankly look like a medieval precursor to the Pocket Pal, the Moss Scuttle is a beautiful piece of hand-crafted pottery (comes in brown or cobalt blue) that looks great on a bathroom counter. And once you try it, you won’t want to shave without it again.

In terms of keeping shaving cream lather heated (and when I say heated, I mean warm, not “hot” — the lather is noticeably warmer and feels much nicer on your face than room-temp lather, but it is not burning hot) for the entire shave, the Moss Scuttle works even better than I expected it would, albeit with a few adjustments I needed to make to get the best out of it.

For starters, my favored Simpson Wee Scot brush was just too small for the Moss Scuttle, even though Sara sent me the small Scuttle (she makes two sizes, small and large, same price) — the handle on the Wee is so wee I ended up with lather up to my wrist. Subbing a longer-handled brush like the Vulfix #2234 worked a lot better, and in fact this brush and the small Moss Scuttle are a match made in heaven.

I also found that certain shaving creams worked better with the Moss Scuttle than others. All of the old-school English creams from Taylor and Trumper worked fantastically well, better in fact than I’ve ever experienced with these creams. But the more modern-type shaving creams I like to use like Nancy Boy, Acqua di Parma, and Maine Shave didn’t lather as well in the Scuttle as they do when I lather up straight from the jar to my face. The English creams were a much better match with the Moss Scuttle, and the combination gave me a new appreciation for creams like Taylor’s Rose and Trumper’s Violet, which I thought I knew about as intimately as you can know a shaving cream. But the sustained heat raised these creams’ performance to new heights I didn’t know they were capable of.

Ever since I got into all this shavegeekery, I’ve read about guys who came up with all sorts of crazy kludges to get hot lather. Microwaving glass bowls. Floating metal dog dishes in a sink of hot water. There’s even a shavegeek subset that, sigh, actually keeps an electric kettle in the bathroom to pour scalding hot water onto the brush before lathering (is it right to call it “skewering” when the dumb beasts throw themselves onto your pointy stick?)

None of these schemes works. The Moss Scuttle, on the other hand, works like a charm, is easy to use, looks gorgeous, and is priced right. Who’d have thought someone could reinvent the shaving mug and actually make it better? If you shave with English creams, you need the Moss Scuttle. You can order the Moss Scuttle here.

Saving You Hours and Hours Throughout the Lifetime

The Internet has long been a place where the “You Must Be This Sane To Ride This Ride” sign is a mere ha’-proton above the floor. Only fools are forgiven for being shocked anymore that someone tetched enough to have a hankering deep inside for some good old-fashioned Photoshop conjoined porn has the Webwithal to actually quiet the shrieking voices inside his head or at least organize them into a tuneful choir long enough to register a domain, buy a hosting plan, BitTorrent Dreamweaver and throw his slab up on the counter alongside Amazon, eBay, and Taquitos. (Best. Use of bandwidth. Ever.)

Planet Shavegeek has its fair share of awe-inspiring depthplum, what with the door-to-door urinal cake salesmen from Modesto posing as landed gentry on the chat boards, but for the most part, the online wetshaving corn-munity is the same stupefyingly boring cookie cutter male hobbyist black hole of slo-mo entropy as any Ham radio chat room, audiophile usenet group, or Chrysler P.T. Cruiser “Krewzerz Korner” — it couldn’t be more typical of a genre that already had a fork in it back when Compuserve at 2400-baud was the shit.

But then there are those giants who suddenly appear, their genius fully-formed, to breathe new life into the shavegeek rock opera. Towering futuremen with eyes lit as from behind like Rasputin’s, who spelunk vast, uncharted caverns the rest of us can’t even see. King Gillette was one such dreamer, as were the Brothers Kampfe before him. And then, for a hundred years, the giants stopped coming.

But lo, it may be time to dust off the mantle and make room for a new face on Mt. Shavemore! Gentlemen, I give you Vivek Baptiwale.

The Good Doctor

I’m proud to report that the Ray Dupont Memorial shavegeek rig on eBay was taken with a whopping winning bid of $810! Congratulations “ForestFace”!

So the Simpson Chubby #3 Super Badger shaving brush donated by Lee’s Razors plus the Merkur Vision DE razor and the Classic Shaving hard shaving soaps I added to the kitty are currently banging around in the hold of a FedEx jet on the way to Houston, and a check for $810 is on its way to the Visiting Nurse Association of the Inland Counties Hospice.

Did I say $810? Even though that was the winning bid, ForestFace — a family and emergency medicine physician in Houston who would prefer to remain anonymous — explained in an email after the auction ended that he’d seen first-hand the difference hospice makes to the process we’ll all have to face someday, so instead of $810, he was sending a check to the VNA for $900!

Words don’t often fail me, but I just don’t know what else to say except jeez louise, wotta guy! Really, I don’t even know where to begin, so just read what the good doctor told me in his email:

“I only wish I had more to give to worthwhile causes such as hospice. Most individuals don’t really appreciate all that they have in this grand country and in their lives. I lived in Bolivia for a few years when I was younger, as an LDS (Mormon) missionary from 1986-88. What I found is that we indeed have much in our existence to be grateful for — but I was even more impressed with the lesson I learned from seeing just how happy individuals who were living in a two room adobe structure with a tin or thatched roof and 2 bare light bulb could be. They somehow seemed to usually have a smile on their faces. I was also impressed with their generous nature. I came to realize the relationship between giving and happiness, and I enjoy sharing what I have been given if it really will help others — hence my interest in really jumping in when you posted this auction.”

I’m blown away by this man’s generosity and spirit, and honored to know him. On behalf of the Dupont family, Lee Cantor of Lee’s Razors, and the VNA Hospice, I want to thank ForestFace for his extraordinarily generous donation, and the other bidders for their support of a worthy cause. Thank you!

Win a Simpson Chubby 3 Shaving Brush

Shaveblog has teamed with Lee Cantor of Lee’s Razors to auction off a brand new Simpson Chubby #3 Super Badger shaving brush to benefit the hospice which helped care for our friend Ray Dupont of Classic Shaving, who passed away on Saturday, April 8th.

Those wishing to bid on this brush may do so here, for eBay auction #6621529102. The winning bid will be donated to the Visiting Nurse Association of the Inland Counties in the name of the winner.

As all card-carrying shavegeeks know, Simpson is the most respected name in high-end shaving brushes, and the hand-made Chubby #3 in Super Badger is the largest and most expensive Simpson brush of them all. Retailing for $385, the CH3 Super is a true classic, considered by many experts and collectors to be the finest shaving brush ever created.

Aw hell, it’s late, I’ve been hitting the Chianti, and I’m in a misty-eyed mood — I’ll also throw in a Merkur Vision DE razor (retail value: $100) a 10-pack of Merkur Platinum DE blades, and two cakes of Classic Shaving shave soap! That brings the retail value of this state-of-the-art wetshaving rig to a whopping $500!

This is what they call a “win-win” — you get to own and enjoy Simpson’s biggest and most expensive brush, Merkur’s biggest and most expensive DE razor, plus a few month’s worth of blades and Ray’s own superior hard shaving soap, and the wonderful folks who gave our friend comfort and care get a generous donation in your name.

No PayPal on this one, kids, and no S/H fee either — I want every penny going to the hospice, and I’ll eat the shipping. The winning bidder must send a check made out to “VNA of the Inland Counties”, and they’ll receive an acknowledgement of their donation for tax purposes.

I miss you, Ray. We all do. Rest in peace, friend.

Ray Dupont, Traditional Shaving’s Guiding Light, Dies at 54

Ray Dupont, whose lifelong fascination with old-fashioned straight razors and safety razors changed the way legions of men shaved every morning and led to the creation of ClassicShaving.com, the Internet’s largest and most successful shaving goods store, died on Saturday, April 8th at his home in Palm Springs, California. He was 54.

The cause of death was cancer. Mr. Dupont had been a cancer survivor for eight years, having successfully undergone surgery when he was first diagnosed with the disease in 1998.

Mr. Dupont’s first exposure to traditional razors and men’s shaving products began as a teenager watching his father shave in the family bathroom with a single-blade safety razor. Despite the evolution of the men’s shaving market in the ensuing years and the appearance of multi-blade and electric razors, Mr. Dupont remained a straight razor stalwart his entire life, believing the old way was the best way. It was a belief that was only strengthened as the blade wars of the last decade led to twin, triple, quadruple, and even quintuple-bladed razors systems which Mr. Dupont felt delivered an inferior shave when compared with a classic straight or safety razor.

A cancer diagnosis in 1998 led Mr. Dupont to sell his first business, Capitol Marine, a Washington DC boat dealership, and after successful surgery he and his wife Laurie bought a new Airstream trailer and set out to travel the country in quiet retirement. But Mr. Dupont soon became restless, and began thinking about turning his vintage shaving collecting hobby into a business. At that time, devotees of old-fashioned straight and safety razors, shaving brushes, and other bygone shaving products had a difficult time finding supplies. Mr. Dupont decided to make it easier for them.

Mr. Dupont launched ClassicShaving.com as a small virtual store on eBay, and when sales outgrew that venue, he re-launched the store with its own web site and expanded offerings, selling everything from hard-to-find English shaving creams and badger-hair shaving brushes to German, French, and Japanese straight and safety razors. Any doubts that a virtual Internet shop could be successful selling old-fashioned men’s shaving products in the age of the Mach3 were dispelled when its first sale, of a $64 straight razor, clocked in at just eighteen minutes after the web site went live for the first time. During its first year, sales doubled each week, and it wasn’t long before Mr. Dupont’s Internet-only venture was bigger than his successful brick-and-mortar boat dealership had been.

Not content to rest on his laurels, Mr. Dupont also taught himself traditional soap-making in order to develop and manufacture his own house brand of traditional hard shaving soap, because as he put it, no cake of shaving soap should cost more than five dollars. So he made his own, and it too became an instant sensation with shaving enthusiasts around the world.

In recent years, Mr. Dupont was instrumental in furthering interest in traditional shaving among the online community, launching the influential Wetshavers discussion group on Microsoft’s MSN site, where legions of men learned how to shave with old fashioned razors and techniques.

In 2005, Mr. Dupont was responsible for successfully pitching a TV segment on traditional shaving to NBC’s “Today Show”, which aired the segment in January, 2005 to great acclaim. Viewer response was so overwhelming that the segment, which featured products Mr. Dupont supplied, caused a worldwide shortage of traditional shaving goods as ClassicShaving.com and its competitors around the globe did a year’s worth of business in just the week following the airing.

In the last year of his life, Mr. Dupont was able to reach millions of people and share his passion for taking a man’s shave as seriously as it used to be by generations past, and by doing so he was single-handedly responsible for the unprecedented boom in straight razor, safety razor, shaving brush, and traditional shaving cream sales which benefited all of these cottage industries, a far-flung community in which he was universally beloved and respected by manufacturer and competitor alike.

Ray Dupont was born in New England to working class parents. After leaving home to join the Army at age 17 he returned from duty in Viet Nam with a Purple Heart for wounds received. Ray met and married his wife Laurie in 1969 and raised his one daughter, Danielle. Other accomplishments include service as a District Commander in the Coast Guard Auxiliary, running a successful Marine Towing and Salvage company, creating and running Capitol Marine, one of the largest Mid-Atlantic bass boat dealerships, and serving on the board of the Accokeek Foundation. Visitors to this site will know him best for the creation and stewardship of ClassicShaving.com, which will continue on under the direction of his family.

Ray Dupont is survived by his wife Laurie, daughter Danielle, granddaughter Samantha, two sisters and three brothers.

Maine Vain

Shaveblog gets a lot of shaving products sent here for review, but Maine Shave is the first line of men’s shaving products that was actually inspired by me, which is more than a little weird, I have to say. Flattering, certainly, but still weird. Tom Jones inspired women to throw panties — I inspired a shaving cream? Doesn’t seem right, though we both love stuffing.

Maine Shave’s main man Herb Pressman says he got the idea to launch his new company after seeing my wetshaving segment last year on the “Today Show”. That same day he bought a shaving brush, a DE razor, and some of the other products I recommended on the show, and got such a bite from the wetshaving chigger he decided to launch his own line of 100-percent all-natural wetshaving products.

What’s Maine Shave cream got? Let’s get out our Romper Room magic mirror:

I see glycerin, and I see olive oil, and I see coconut oil, and I see castor oil, and I see grapefruit seed extract, and I see sea kelp, and I see shea butter, and I see Jojoba, and I see aloe, and I see lavender, and I see rosemary, and I see bentonite clay, and I see wheat germ extract.

What’s Maine Shave not got? Parabens, quaternay compounds, hydantions or ureas, according to Pressman. Parabens I’ve heard of. That other stuff? Beats me. I could Google them and spit wise but would you buy it? Probably not. Suffice it to say, Herb doesn’t like them, so Maine Shave doesn’t have them.

Maine Shave also doesn’t have much of a scent either, by design. Pressman wanted the shaving cream to be virtually unscented, with “only the subtle, non-lingering scent of its all-natural preservative system — no competition for your favorite cologne”. I did smell a very faint scent, sort of a buttery, puddingy kind of thing, but it’s subtle and goes bye-bye as soon as you rinse your face off, which is nice.

I’ve noticed that all of the cologne-scented shaving creams I’ve tried do tend to leave a lingering scent behind, though the florals like Taylor’s Rose, Trumper’s Violet, and Nancy Boy smell incredible during the shave but rinse away completely when you’re finished. Maine Shave seems tailor-made for guys who don’t care for floral-scented shaving creams but don’t want to go the cologne-based route either because they don’t want anything clashing with their spoor.

The Maine Shave cream comes in a 3.75 ounce jar for $20. The cream itself is very different from both the old-school English creams like Trumper/Taylor/Truefitt, and the new-school skin-friendlier creams like Nancy Boy and Cremo Cream. Maine Shave is more like a buttery paste than a fluffy soap-based cream, and you can’t really scoop out a fingerful and expect it to disappear into a thick, creamy lather with a few swirls of a water-logged badger brush. It wants to stay a glob of butter-paste, and doesn’t readily explode into a big mound of lather like the English creams. Pressman recommends swirling the tips of your shaving brush in the jar of Maine Shave till you get enough on there to start making lather on your puss.

But even then, don’t expect the same thick, meringue-like peaks you get with the English creams — the emphasis is on quality, not quantity. I was able to whip the Maine Shave up into a decent pile of lather in the new Moss Scuttle (more on this interesting product later this week), but once I began brushing it on my face, I got the same thin layer of lube I did when applying this cream with just my fingers.

I shaved with Maine Shave for several days in a row with my usual 1940’s Gillette Super Speed DE razor, “no-name” Israeli Personna blades, and a Simpson Wee Scot brush. Aside from the adjustment of shaving without any real scent to enhance the experience, I got some very close, very comfortable shaves with this cream. The thinner lather and near-total lack of scent take some getting used to if you’re coming off something like Nancy Boy cream, but once I got down to the shave itself I was very impressed with Maine Shave.

As you’d expect from a shaving cream with moisturizing ingredients like shea butter, olive oil and Jojoba, Maine Shave left my skin feeling much smoother and more conditioned immediately after the shave than it does with the old-school English creams. I almost skipped applying my usual rosehip seed oil aftershave because the Maine Shave cream left my skin feeling so good. Guys with sensitive skin should definitely try Maine Shave — it’s one of the more skin-friendly shaving creams I’ve come across.

Now, I’m not convinced that a shaving cream has to be all-natural and free of things like parabens and fragrance in order to deliver a world-class shave and be nice to your skin. Many of the English creams are chock full of stuff you sort of don’t want to know about if you shop at health food stores and/or are named Ethan, yet they’ve been shaving generations of men superbly and without anyone’s cheeks falling off. Even the new-school, superbly skin-friendly Nancy Boy shaving cream has — gasp — parabens, and frankly, I’d kill or at least allow myself to be slowly killed by Bad Chemicals to have skin like the gay guys who mostly use this stuff.

I know lots of guys who can’t use this or that shaving cream because it gives them a burning sensation, irritates their skin, and just generally doesn’t do what a good shaving cream’s supposed to, which is lube and protect and leave your skin feeling great afterward. For these guys, Maine Shave will be a godsend. If you’ve ever wanted to try Kramer’s Butter Shave, this is probably the closet you’ll ever come without unwrapping a stick of Land o’ Lakes.

Rush

I was halfway out the front door in pre-workout Hobo Lite regalia — shorts (okay, so they’re bathing trunks from the Gap, but they have this netting inside that kinda sorta subs for a jock) , t-shirt, hadn’t shaved yet (saving that for the Y) — when friends of ours showed up at the appointed time for a visit I’d completely forgotten about, their car pulling up in front of the house just as I did a whiplash 180 and hauled ass back inside to throw on some pants and catch a rush-job shave.

You know the drill. No time to shave but no way you can go without one, so you pretend the fuse is lit and you’ve got thirty seconds to look presentable. To hell with “baby’s butt smooth” and all that shavegeek hoo-ha. If you don’t shave in under a minute, your boss will fire you/your wife will leave you/your puppy will die.

I know lots of guys who do this every morning — they sleep till the last possible second, then tear ass through their grooming before running out the door to work. I used to do it myself, back in the days when shaving meant scraping a wretched Good News! disposable razor across my face with nothing but a squirt of canned goo for lube.

As soon as I slammed the bathroom door behind me I flashed through my options —

1. Nancy Boy shaving cream
Pro: Excellent shave, even when applied by hand without a brush.
Con: No time to unscrew the tub lid! Next!

2. Hot water-only shave
Pro: I’ve done it before and I’ll do it again if I have to.
Con: Sucks unbelievably, lousy shave, beats up the face, I could go on. Think dammit think!

3. Ultra Shave
Pro: Excellent shave, no need for water, works as own aftershave.
Con: Now where did I put that can? I’m fucking hosed!

4. Just skip the shave
Pro: Saves 30 seconds I can apply toward expertly adjusting baseball cap that makes me look even more like a jackass than just walking around with bed-head.
Con: I would sooner greet guests wearing crotchless panties than skip shaving. On the other hand..

Then I remembered catching a shave once with Pacific Shaving Oil all by its lonesome, and you know something? It wasn’t half-bad. Not as good as a full-on brush’n’cream geekathon, but it was pretty good and more importantly, fast as hell.

I didn’t have a bottle of Pacific oil on hand but I did have some rosehip seed oil — I’ve been using this as an amazingly effective aftershave, so I grabbed the bottle and hoped for the best. All I had time for was one downward pass, so I quickly splashed my face with hot water, rubbed about 10 drops of rosehip seed oil all over my face and neck, and started in with my Gillette Super Speed DE razor.

Bad, bad move. If I’d had a few more seconds to actually think this one through, I would’ve realized that rosehip seed oil is very different from sunflower oil, avocado oil, and all the other lube-happy ingredients in the various shave and pre-shave oils. Rosehip seed oil absorbs into the skin very quickly, and what lube there is doesn’t last very long. So basically, I got a hot water-only shave after all.

And man, did it suck. The DE blade painfully tugged and pulled on every single whisker, like it was trying to yank them out by the roots instead of lop them off cleanly at skin level. And this was with an Israeli Personna blade in a 40s Super Speed, which isn’t an aggressive rig at all.

In fact, this horrible shave was like a flashback to the old days, when I used to hate shaving because it hurt while I was doing it and then my skin felt raw all day long. I’ve got it so good now with the brushes and the high-quality creams and the old-school safety razors that I forget how dreadful a shave can be without all this stuff I’ve grown so accustomed to.

I think the one thing that doesn’t really get spelled out to newbies in all the “How To Shave Old-School” essays on the Net, mine included, is that the whole drill of using hot water, a badger brush, and quality glycerine-based shaving cream on your face is all about softening your whiskers so the blade cuts through them like wet spaghetti. It’s not just about making your skin slippery.

Keep your face wet with hot water for at least 2 minutes and lather up with some good glycerine shaving cream, and you can get an easy, painless shave with pretty much anything above a Flicker. Most guys who try it for the first time wonder why the razor isn’t cutting anything, because all the hair-tugging and pain they’ve gotten used to is suddenly gone, forever.

My face looked like hell and stung all day long. I looked worse than if I hadn’t shaved and just joined our guests looking like a comfortable bum instead of a pained jackass in a baseball cap pulled low on his bed-head and wearing a pair of jeans over swimming trunks so the telltale bulge made it look like I was wearing adult diapers.

How am I married?

Oracle

I got an email this week from a guy at Microsoft who’s getting into wetshaving, lamenting the fact that he can’t find a 1940’s Super Speed razor for a decent price on eBay now that my comments have driven the market for vintage Gillettes to irrational exuberance.

“You’re the Alan Greenspan of shave,” he compl-imented/ained. “Say something nasty about these razors so prices’ll come down. Pretty soon there’ll be a shortage of rosehip seed oil.”

Thing is, I can’t help it. I find these things that work spectacularly well for my shaving and I blog about them. That’s the drill. Take that away and you’ve got just another whiny shavegeek forum like CutMySamwich and Beavis&Bladehead.

I will say one thing about all this eBay craziness, though. For some reason, the geeks seem to be under the impression that not only are two particular models of vintage Gillette DEs some kind of magic bullets, but that they’re actually rare and, gulp, investment grade.

That’s right — we’ve somehow reached the point where a crusty old razor some hobo probably stored up his ass while hopping the Central Pacific all the way from Colton to Salt Lake is the new yuppie hedge fund.

Hey, like I should talk. I’ve got enough old razors at this point to completely let myself go, get as fat as a whale and never work or bathe again. Just roam the neighborhood in dirty sweatpants that are too small for me, carelessly farting and barking orders at strangers while waving a gun around.

Beloved Wife knows the stash I’m sitting on, and that’s why she smiles sweetly and cuts my samwiches just the way I like them, diagonally, because there’s nothing sweeter than that first bite in the middle of a diagonal-cut samwich where all the meat bulges and no crust can be seen for miles.

But even I don’t possess the two “Fool’s Gold” Gillettes setting eBay on fire right now:

The “Toggle”

and the “195”

The shavegeeks worship these two models like no other and bid them up into the hundreds of dollars, and that should tell you all you need to know about their real worth. Because both of these razors are exactly, and I mean exactly the same from the neck up as any other 1960s Gillette adjustable DE you can still score on eBay for ten or fifteen bucks.

In fact, the Toggle is the exact same razor as the standard 60s Gillette, except it has a toggle lever instead of a TTO twist-to-open knob at the bottom. That’s it. Aside from that, it’s just another decent 60s adjustable, not quite as good as the 50s Gillettes and not nearly as good as the 40s models. Oh wait, it’s GOLD! Yippee!!

Same deal with the 195. Like the Toggle, it’s essentially a failed experiment to see what the standard adjustable DE would look like if the adjustment collar were moved to the bottom of the handle instead of the top. But the shaving head is exactly the same as any other 60s Gillette adjustable, and just like the Toggle, the shave is no different. If anything, it’s a step backward, as the adjustment collar, which stays nicely out of your way on the standard version, bulges right there in your hand where you grip the handle while shaving. So every time you rinse and shake the razor, “Did I jostle the adjustment? Am I about to slice my neck open?” is in the back of your mind.

Maybe it’s a good thing the geeks are chasing these two Fools Gold razors. It’s not like they’re taking any good DEs out of the pool for the rest of us who just want to catch a good shave. And a month from now, when the market corrects itself and the values of the Toggle and the 195 have plunged to where they should be, you can tell yourself you were there when the bubble finally popped and a new generation of hobos and their razors become fast friends.

Welcome New York Times Readers

Thank you, Peter Jaret, for the nice writeup in today’s Times! For Times readers checking Shaveblog out for the first time, I thought it might be good to repost the oft-linked wetshaving primer I wrote last year that started all of this — the Today Show segment, the MSNBC article, the old-school shaving boom, and this blog. I’ve updated the text with new tips and links I’ve picked up since the original article ran, so if you’re interested in seeing what all the fuss is about, read on:

The Perfect Shave

Corey Greenberg

Ever since prehistoric man first scraped a seashell across his cheek so prehistoric woman would let him dance cheek-to-cheek, shaving has been a part of the male experience. But even with today’s high-tech razors, lots of men still get nicks, cuts, and razor burn. That’s why the latest trend in male grooming, “wetshaving”, promises a better shave by going back to the old school.

The perfect shave is what all men strive for every morning when they bring their razor up to their chin — an effortless shave that’s baby smooth, and without any of the usual skin irritation, redness, and that burning sensation most guys seem to feel is par for the course when it comes to shaving.

Why do so many guys find this so hard to achieve? Because proper shaving has become a lost art. Shaving is one of those glorious male traditions that used to be passed down from father to son, but somewhere along the line, shaving became more about cheap, disposable razors than a nice, precision-made metal tool in your hand. In a single generation, shaving went from a pleasant, contemplative exercise in good grooming to a brainless routine to slash through in the morning without even thinking about it.

A disposable or cartridge razor dragged across a layer of foam or gel on your dry cheek is a step backward from the past, not an improvement. Now that men of all ages are once again paying attention to their appearance, it’s no wonder that the hottest trend right now in male grooming is a return to the traditional wet shave. And those who try it are shocked to discover that the “old-fashioned” method of shaving they thought went out with the Hula Hoop is actually the best quality shave of them all.

Wetshaving is just what the term implies — keeping your face wet with plenty of hot water before and during the entire shave. In fact, you should always shave after a hot shower, not before (if you need to shave without taking a shower, try washing your face with hot water for a few minutes).

Believe it or not, but your whiskers are tougher than the edge of a razor blade, and shaving “dry”, or mostly dry as with the vast majority of shaving creams, foams, and gels on the market, means you’re literally tugging on each and every hair on your face instead of neatly slicing it at the skin’s surface and moving on without irritating your skin.

With a layer of hot water between your skin and the lather, the blade skims the surface instead of dragging on it, which is the main cause of irritation, redness, and “shave bumps”. Most men are astonished the first time they have a proper wet shave, because the razor no longer pulls, tugs, and otherwise fights the whiskers — it just glides over your skin leaving a clean path in its wake.

The Shaving Brush

The perfect shave has three ingredients: a good razor, a good brush, and glycerin-based shaving cream. But the biggest difference between wetshaving and the way most guys shave today is the use of a shaving brush. A good badger-hair shaving brush is the single most important ingredient in getting the perfect shave — if you change no part of your shaving routine except to add a good shaving brush to the mix, you’ll be astounded at how much better and more enjoyable your shaves become.

Take it from a guy who used to use his fingers to smear cheap shaving gel on his face that smelled just like his deodorant — using a fine badger hair brush to lather high-end English shaving cream that smells like fresh-cut violets onto your face and neck isn’t just about treating yourself nicely after years of the ol’ slice’n’dice. It’s also the best possible way to prepare your skin and whiskers for the closest, most comfortable shave.

A shaving brush isn’t a paint brush for your face. A good brush — the best brushes are made of badger hair and start at $25 — absorbs hot water and then, after you dip the tip of the brush into your shaving cream, the brush releases and mixes the hot water with the cream as you swirl the brush around on your face and neck. The combination of hot water mixing with the cream and getting beaten by the brush all over your face delivers a thicker, richer, more emollient lather than you can get from a can, no matter what the brash young He-Men in the commercials with no hair on their chests wearing a bath towel being playfully tugged at by a gyrating tigress may tell you.

A shaving brush also gently exfoliates, or removes the dead skin, from your face before shaving, which gets rid of anything coming between the blade and your whiskers. Finally, the brush lifts your whiskers and suspends them standing upright in the thick lather, which exposes the maximum whisker length to your blade as it skims along your face. Never mind that using a shaving brush feels really, really good on your face right after a nice hot shower — it happens to be the very best way to prepare your face for the shave of your life.

High quality badger hair shaving brushes come in all sizes and hair types, costing anywhere from $25 for a basic “pure” or “fine” grade badger model to $550 for a monster-sized, high-end “silvertip” job. Do you need a $550 shaving brush? Unless you’re Mr. Burns, the answer is no. I’ve tried a lot of shaving brushes over the years, from the entry-level to the obscenely expensive, and I got no better lather or shave from the expensive brushes than I do with the reasonably priced brushes I finally settled on. Once you go above $75 or so, you’re paying for snob/collector appeal, not a better shave.

Most shavegeeks go for the biggest brush they can hoist, but I get the best results with the small-to-medium sized brushes like the $55 Vulfix #2233 and Simpson’s almost comically small $65 Wee Scot. They’re a lot easier to use, you don’t get sloppy lather flying everywhere like you do with the bigger brushes, and you don’t wind up dumping a lot of unused lather down the drain. They’re also the perfect size to throw in your dopp kit for travel (hey, why shave like a heathen when you’re on the road?).

I recommend the English-made Vulfix brushes as the best bang for the buck. They’re much more reasonably priced than a lot of high-end British shaving brushes, and they lather right up there with the best of them. The brush shown above is Vulfix’s #2233, which is a medium-sized “super” grade brush that hits the sweet spot for size, price, and performance — at just $55, the Vulfix puts far more expensive brushes to shame when it comes to building world-class lather.

The Safety Razor

The next tool you need for wetshaving is a razor. And by razor, I mean whatever high-quality, non-disposable razor you feel most comfortable with. I know, I know, disposables are cool because that’s what they hand out in jail. But most disposables are extremely hard on your skin because the quality of the blades isn’t as good as a cartridge razor, or better yet, the kind of razor that serious wetshavers use: the classic double-edge safety razor.

A DE razor is the kind that takes a single, disposable razor blade, and it’s the same type of razor that your father, your grandfather, Cary Grant, Lee Marvin, JFK, and John Wayne used. Take it from me — the classic DE wipes the floor with any modern razor, I don’t care how many blades it’s got or whether it buzzes like a vibrating egg. Ever since I switched to using a DE razor from a Mach3, I’ve gotten much closer and more comfortable shaves, my face doesn’t burn at all anymore, and all the red irritation on my neck I thought was there for good went away completely.

DE razors are also the best choice for African-American men, many of whom suffer from “shave bumps”, which occur when their tougher whiskers are cut too aggressively by modern multi-blade razors, causing them to grow back underneath the skin and turn into ingrown hairs. Switching to a DE and using a shaving brush to exfoliate the skin and prep the whiskers is good for men of all races, but African-American men in particular find that shaving with a safety razor clears up their skin and makes shaving a pleasure again.

The men’s grooming boom has created a huge resurgence of interest in vintage safety razors. Gillette’s fixed-head and adjustable DEs from the 1940s and 50s are the most highly-coveted safety razors, and with good reason — they shave like a dream, look impossibly cool, and last forever. Your best bet is eBay, but be forewarned that even if you find one for a good price ($10-20), you’ll most likely have to boil it for 10 mins and scrub it with a toothbrush and some Bar Keeper’s Friend cleanser before you raise it to your chin. I like the 40s Super Speed and 50s short-handled Adjustable Gillettes the best, and the older 3-piece Gillettes the least.

Another great safety razor to be on the lookout for is the classic Schick Injector. While Schick stopped making these single-edge razors awhile back, they still make the blades (I buy mine at Amazon.com!). The Schick Injector is an interesting safety razor, because it’s’ the “missing link” between the old-school DE and the modern multi-blade. It’s a single-blade razor, but its shaving head is angled more like a cartridge razor, and most newbies find it much easier to immediately grok when coming over from a Mach3, etc.

Like a DE, Injectors shave circles around modern razors. In fact, Injector blades are noticeably thicker than a DE’s, so they shave almost like a mini straight razor — amazingly close, yet much more comfortably than a multi-blade. I’ve got a few vintage bakelite-handled Shick/Eversharp Injectors from the ’40s that shave as well as any razor I own, not to mention the fact that they look infinitely mo’ bitchin’ than some faux-metallic plastic stick with bright neon-colored rubber nubbies.

As cool as these vintage razors are, some guys feel more comfortable using a brand new razor that’s never stroked another fella’s puss. Personally, I think it would be cool to shave with an old razor that used to belong to, say, Cary Grant, but the fact is, a goodly number of eBay razors have been at one time or another up a hobo’s ass. I’m not saying all of them were, or even that most of them were, but you have to accept that some of these vintage safety razors must have gone Papillon at some point. So if you absolutely positively want to avoid going there, the good news is that there are new safety razors available that are every bit as good as many vintage models.

The German company Merkur offers a whole range of extremely high-quality safety razors, with their biggest bang for the buck being the HD “Hefty Classic”. It’s an excellent razor to start with if you’ve decided to take the DE plunge, and lots of guys love it so much they won’t shave with anything else. I love the HD and highly recommend it — it’s a simple, no-nonsense, astonishingly effective DE that shaves me as close as anything else I’ve tried, price be damned.

A razor’s only as good as the blade you feed it. Unlike modern cartridge razors, though, DE razors offer you lots of choices when it comes to blades. Some DE blades are mild and forgiving, others are scary-sharp and prone to nicks if you don’t know what you’re doing.

The German Merkur Platinum blades are sold by most vendors who sell Merkur’s razors and they’re of good quality, but I find these blades can be inconsistent and not terribly forgiving for the first-time wetshaver, so I don’t recommend them if you’re just starting out.

A much better choice would be the American Personna relabeled “house brand” blades you find in drugstores, which are inexpensive and much smoother than the Merkurs. Even better are the $25/100 Personna blades made in Israel, aka the “no-name” marked simply “Super+” which can be bought in boxes of 100 for $25 on eBay or here.

The Israeli “no-names” are my favorite DE blades of all, because they’re incredibly smooth, forgiving, and easy on the face, yet in a good vintage Gillette or new Merkur they can deliver that perfect, baby’s butt shave at the very heart of the shavegeek trip. I wish I’d known about these blades when I first picked up a DE, because they would’ve saved me a lot of time and claret.

At the other end of the spectrum are the Japanese Feather High Stainless Platinum blades. These are easily the sharpest, most unforgiving DE blades on the market. My skin can’t cope with the Feather blades without nicks galore, but I know shavegeeks who won’t feed their DEs any other blade. The Feather Platinums can deliver a skin-peeling shave in the right hands, but I don’t recommend them for newbies, or even seasoned wetshavers with sensitive skin.

Ironically, the DE blades Gillette sells in the US are, quite literally, the worst a man can get — harsh, rough, and so bad you’d be forgiven for thinking they were made that way on purpose to get you to ditch the DE and use a Fusion instead.

The Shaving Cream

A high-quality, glycerin-based shaving cream is the final ingredient in the perfect shave. If your shaving cream/gel comes in a can and costs less than a coffee at Starbucks, or even Dunkin’ Donuts for that matter (and their joe’s better besides), prepare to be astonished at what old-school shaving cream lathers, shaves, and above all, smells like. Yes, I said smells like! If you’ve never lathered up in the morning with a fine English shaving cream that smells like fresh-cut violets, limes, or lavender, then you are truly missing out on one of the great manly pleasures.

The Brits have been making this stuff for centuries, and they really do make some of the best shaving creams on the planet. At around $20 for a tub and $12 for a travel tube, they may seem a bit more expensive than the foams and gels at the drugstore, but since a little goes a long way when lathered with a shaving brush, these high-end creams are actually a good value and last for many months of daily shaving.

I use and recommend Geo F. Trumper’s and Taylor of Old Bond Street’s shaving creams in both tubs for the bathroom and small tubes for travel. My personal favorites are Trumper’s Violet, and Taylor’s Avocado and Rose creams — these shaving creams will spoil you rotten for anything else when lathered onto your face with hot water and a badger shaving brush. And the intoxicating scents of these top-shelf creams will make you actually look forward to shaving, probably for the first time in your life.

The Art of Shaving makes a nice shaving cream as well, in the old-school English style. I especially like their Lavender cream, made with real lavender essential oil. AOS has shops all over the country and its products can be found in many mall’s men’s departments, where it’s usually the only good shaving cream in the display case.

I also recommend the legendary eucalyptus shaving cream from Italy called Proraso. This $7 wonder comes in a large, bright green toothpaste tube, and has been the best-selling shaving product in Italy since the 1940s. Despite its budget price, Proraso actually shaves on a par with the fancy English creams, and it has the added benefit of eucalyptus oil, which gives your face an incredible cooling effect when you splash with cold water at the end of the shave. Like the Trumper and Taylor shaving creams, you can buy Proraso online, but you might also check your local Target, as the chain recently began carrying Proraso’s entire line of old-school shaving products.

While most of the boutique “upscale” shaving creams marketed to young guys and metrosexuals are crap, two “new-school” shaving creams recently hit the market that give the best English creams a run for their money. London’s Truefitt & Hill has been around since 1805 (a full century before King Gillette invented the safety razor!), andwhile the venerated English firm’s traditional shaving creams are excellent, their new Ultimate Comfort unscented shaving cream is their best yet. Creamier and kinder to sensitive skin, the Ultimate Comfort is an easy recommendation.

My favorite shaving cream these days is Nancy Boy’s amazing lavender, peppermint, and rosemary scented cream. It’s extremely skin-friendly and chock full of beneficial ingredients like avocado oil, aloe, allantoin, cucumber extract, Vitamin E, and genuine lavender, peppermint, and rosemary essential oils, with no harsh soaps or artificial fragrance. The Nancy Boy shaving cream also works well brushless, if you’re in a hurry. But lather this stuff up with a good badger brush and it just doesn’t get any better – my skin feels much more moisturized after a shave with Nancy Boy than with any other shaving cream I’ve used. If I could only shave with one cream, this would be it.

How To Shave Like A Man

After you emerge from a nice, hot shower, fill the sink with hot water and let your shaving brush soak in it. Splash some more hot water on your face to keep it wet. The key to wetshaving is keeping your face wet throughout the shave, so the blade never comes in contact with dry skin.

Remove your brush from the water, hold it bristles-down, and give it a slight shake to get rid of the excess water. You want some water in the brush to make good lather, but not so much water that your lather turns out thin and runny.

Open your tub of shaving cream, scoop out about a nickel-sized dollop of cream with your finger, and place it on the wet tips of your brush’s bristles. Some guys swirl the brush and cream in a mug or bowl to build up their lather, while others just cup their other hand and build up the lather in that. I like to cut to the chase and build the lather directly on my face by swirling the brush around on my neck, chin, and cheeks till I’ve got a nice, thick layer of opaque lather.

Once you’ve lathered your face and neck, stand your brush up on the counter and pick up your razor. The first thing you need to know is that a safety razor doesn’t have a pivoting head, so unlike a Mach3 or a Fusion, the blade doesn’t hug your face no matter how half-assed you are with the razor. So you’ll need to maintain the right blade angle yourself.

Sounds difficult, but after a shave or two, most guys grok it just fine. You want to shoot for a blade angle of approximately 30 degress — not so shallow the blade misses the whiskers, and not so high you scrape your skin instead of shave it clean. It may take a shave or seven before you get this down, but once you do you’ll be amazed at how close a single-blade razor can shave without pulling on your whiskers and burning your skin like modern multi-blades do.

At first, you want to shave downward on your face and neck, with the direction your whiskers grow. A North-to-South shave will get rid of most visible stubble without irritating your skin. If you want a shave that feels baby’s butt smooth to the touch, wet your face again, lather up again, and shave very lightly upward against the grain.

If you can’t shave against the grain without irritation, try a second N-S downward shave. In most cases, you’ll approach that baby’s butt smoothness without any of the razor burn that a S-N pass gives most guys. But I’m not going to lie to you — if you want baby’s butt, shave upward, young man. Just do it as lightly as possible and only do it for one pass, after you shave downward first to clear most of the bramble.

Once you’re done shaving, rinse your face with cold water to close the pores, and thoroughly rinse your razor and shaving brush of lather. Shake your brush a few times to dry it, wipe it gently on your towel, and stand it on its handle to finish drying. This will let the bristles air-dry without damaging them, so your brush will last 20 years or more.

Pat, don’t rub, your face dry with a clean towel, and finish up with a good non-alcohol-based after-shave or moisturizer — Trumper’s Skin Food is one of the best, but any good moisturizer will be better than that stinging alcohol-based stuff that we’ve all suffered with. Some guys swear by witch hazel, which is cheap, good, and perfect for closing your pores and soothing your face. Lately I’ve been using moisturizing oils like Jojoba and rosehip seed oil, and my skin has never been happier after a shave.

CAUTION!

If you’ve been shaving with a disposable razor or one of the modern multi-blade cartridge systems like the Mach3, be aware that switching to a single-blade DE will require that you un-learn all the bad habits that modern razors are designed to let sleepy, lazy guys get away with. Mainly, that means slower, more careful strokes, and guiding the blade over your skin without pressing down too much.

Let me say that again.

Without pressing down too much.

It’s really not a big deal — men have been shaving this way for over a hundred of years, well before plastic disposables and 5-blade razors were invented. Once you slow down and stop pressing the blade against your face so hard, you’ll find that not only do you get a closer, smoother shave, but all of that burning sensation and red marks all over your neck will start to go away immediately, and then disappear for good.

If you end up with a few nicks your first few shaves with a DE, don’t worry, it happened to all of us — your grandpa, Lee Marvin, and me — when we first picked up a safety razor. It’s your face’s way of telling you to stop being a knucklehead. After a few shaves, you’ll figure it all out, and then you’ll wonder why you haven’t been shaving like this your whole life.

Blessed Art Shaveblog

Given the sheer number of “Jesus Shaves” t-shirts and posters, the parodic parochial mashup between wetshaving and Son-O’-God rivals the Darwin Fish as the most widely-deployed display of Rebellion Lite since the barbed-wire bicep tattoo.

But I say to you, woe be unto him who gets his yuks at His expense. For it is written in Isaiah 7:20:

“In the same day shall the Lord shave with a razor that is hired, namely, by them beyond the river by the king of Assyria, the head, and the hair of the feet: and it shall also consume the beard.”

Further, ask a deaf man to sign “minister” or “priest”, and he’ll make a shaving motion across his throat utilizing Frink’s famed Third Diagonal, the experienced wetshaver’s final clean-up pass:

You might think the gesture is meant to evoke a collar, but you’d be wrong — if he was trying to do that, he’d use both hands, like he was the Fonz flipping up the collar on his leather jacket. Haven’t you ever played Charades?

Verily, the full and sacred text of Shaveblog has been called the “shaving enthusiasts online bible”, and with good and just reason. For it has inspired both beatific worship among the enlightened, and blasphemic revulsion among the paynim.

But now the tongue of the ignoble jackal lies dormant and thick in its throat. For Shaveblog has just become part of the actual religious canon, used as a parable to teach young Christians about the proper moral values that will ensure them entrance into the kingdom of Heaven. Yes, a church full of innocent young children sat in hushed silence a few weeks ago to receive the word of the Lord, and that word was Shaveblog.

And it was Good.

Dr. Daniel Harrell is the Associate Minister of Boston’s evangelical Park Street Church, a member of the Conservative Congregational Christian Conference. Dr. Harrell is a man of deep Christian faith who has journeyed to the Phillippines, France, Benin, Bolivia and Nepal to carry the message of Jesus Christ and to save men’s souls from hellfire without respite, much in the same way I recommend the best razors, brushes, shaving creams, and techniques to those who would otherwise suffer eternal damnation.

We are kindred spirits, Dr. Harrell and I. So it should come as no surprise that his sermon on March 5th led off with a discussion of Shaveblog that segued nicely into a reading of St. Paul in 2 Corinthians 5:10 which compares the Day of Judgement with — and I’m not making this up — a very close shave.

Listen, jackal and disciple alike, and go forth as a new man.

Shaveblog

Summer Shaving

June 06, 2006, 10:36pm

Get Musgo Real

June 02, 2006, 12:12am

Shaveblog is One

May 26, 2006, 1:29am

Hedwig and the Optical Inch

May 11, 2006, 12:28pm

Lush Life

May 02, 2006, 9:18pm

Scuttlebutt

April 24, 2006, 10:40pm

Saving You Hours and Hours Throughout the Lifetime

April 20, 2006, 9:00pm

The Good Doctor

April 19, 2006, 11:41pm

Win a Simpson Chubby 3 Shaving Brush

April 10, 2006, 9:59pm

Ray Dupont, Traditional Shaving’s Guiding Light, Dies at 54

April 10, 2006, 8:17am

Maine Vain

April 09, 2006, 11:14pm

Rush

April 02, 2006, 6:13pm

Oracle

March 29, 2006, 8:14pm

Welcome New York Times Readers

March 22, 2006, 11:00pm

29 notes

Blessed Art Shaveblog

March 20, 2006, 9:24pm

About

Search

Colophon

Shaveblog

Summer Shaving

June 06, 2006, 10:36pm

Get Musgo Real

June 02, 2006, 12:12am

Shaveblog is One

May 26, 2006, 1:29am

Hedwig and the Optical Inch

May 11, 2006, 12:28pm

Lush Life

May 02, 2006, 9:18pm

Scuttlebutt

April 24, 2006, 10:40pm

Saving You Hours and Hours Throughout the Lifetime

April 20, 2006, 9:00pm

The Good Doctor

April 19, 2006, 11:41pm

Win a Simpson Chubby 3 Shaving Brush

April 10, 2006, 9:59pm

Ray Dupont, Traditional Shaving’s Guiding Light, Dies at 54

April 10, 2006, 8:17am

Maine Vain

April 09, 2006, 11:14pm

Rush

April 02, 2006, 6:13pm

Oracle

March 29, 2006, 8:14pm

Welcome New York Times Readers

March 22, 2006, 11:00pm

29 notes

Blessed Art Shaveblog

March 20, 2006, 9:24pm

About

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Search

Colophon