Shaving Technologies

I too have very sensitive skin. But my skin does tolerate the classic Old Spice after shave, which is really nice because I love that stuff.

Sorry but no, mine is not quite so luxurious.

Heh, I am perpetually lazy and sensitive-skinned, and I am for sure a beginner! That’s some interesting background info, thanks. Out of curiosity, what razor did you get after this one?

The trick with after-shave is: If it has alcohol in it, you’re better off not using it at all.

Out of curiosity, what razor did you get after this one?

My great grandpa had an open comb Gillette “NEW” from '31 (like Open-comb razors – Later On). The open comb can go through anything without needing to buzz it down first. For awhile I would grow a big beard then shave it off with that thing with no issues. Now I shave once a week but still like how easily the open comb goes through my stubble.

I probably posted this before. But why not repeat a classic. My grandpa’s cutthroat razor:

I can’t get it sharp enough. Grandpa used that stone. Me, I guess I either don’t have the wrist for it or the face for it.

Those Henckels Zwilling have a reputation for being hard to hone. They sure look nice, though. I once lost at an auction for a set of three of them, they went for really cheap but a last second bidder snagged them.

OK, after getting disgusted every time I paid for Gillette Mach 3 refills, I finally bit the bullet. This is what I hinted my wife could get me for Christmas and she did ;) -

-Edwin Jagger De89lbl Double Edge Safety Razor Chrome Plated Lined Detail, Chrome

Absolutely love it. But one question: when I’ve used soap and a brush in the past, the soap was a round piece that fit in a mug. This stuff is not a solid round “puck”. Do you put the container itself in a mug or can you not use a shaving mug with this brand?

OK, after getting disgusted every time I paid for Gillette Mach 3 refills, I finally bit the bullet. This is what I hinted my wife could get me for Christmas and she did ;) -

-Edwin Jagger De89lbl Double Edge Safety Razor Chrome Plated Lined Detail, Chrome

Absolutely love it. But one question: when I’ve used soap and a brush in the past, the soap was a round piece that fit in a mug. This stuff is not a solid round “puck”. Do you put the container itself in a mug or can you not use a shaving mug with this brand?

The proraso “soap” is somewhere between soap and a cream, so my gf (who used the sensitive skin variant for quite some time) just left it in that particular tub. Wet the brush, swirl in the soap until you pick up a reasonable amount of it, then lather either directly on your face or in a separate bowl, as your preference.

Some places do sell mug-able pucks (Crabtree & Evelyn’s excellent soaps fit well into a large latte mug, and I think that Mitchell’s Wool Fat soap is about the same size), and some are even smaller (like Williams, often available at common pharmacies).

I just finished a tub of the menthol Proraso. I dampen my brush, load it up with the soap right out of the container, then add a bit more water and lather up on my face. Might not be the best method, but its been effective for me.

I use a different brand but just load some soap on my brush and then build up a lather in the palm of my hand. Works well that way.

OK, while I was really going for the overall aesthetics of a classy soap mug sitting next to my stand with the razor and brush, I can live with just working out of the Proaso. BTW - what are current recommendations for best soap for safety razors?

Also, I think I need a good after shave lotion or whatever, this is giving a good clean shave but my neck is a bit more “raw” than it was with a disposable and shaving gel. Recommendations there?

(Also I may not be the best for recommendations for others, as I have a beard and all I’m shaving is my neck and touch up on the face, like around the lips and above the beard. )

Standard boat of things on the shaving advice front before putting more money into it :). Sorry if any of this comes across as condescending. I assume–from your lengthy and informative iPad gift threads–that you’re the kind of guy who does like to make his money count and is willing to research a hobby/purchase a lot before making it, but this is just standard stuff I’d recommend to anyone with irritation.

Make sure your shaved areas (however large or small they may be, and god this entire sentence is starting to sound like some weird innuendo) are warm and well moistened before shaving; makes the hairs softer and easier to cut.

Apply thick layers of creamy lather anytime the blade will touch your skin. Unlike an auto-adjusting cartridge razor that never lets much blade hit your skin, allowing some folks to even shave with just water and one, your new safety razor is gonna expose a lot more blade that will irritate you–especially in sensitive areas–so never run it across an unlathered area–even if you just scraped the lather off a second ago ;)

Work in patterns and learn the direction of your beard growth across your face. Mine grows “down” on my cheeks and upper lip and “out” (away from Adam’s apple) on my neck, except one weird patch on my left jawline that grows “in” (toward the center of the neck). Even when the beard’s short, let your first pass be with the grain. Depending on how close of a shave you want, make the next (relathered) pass across the grain (e.g., right or left on an “up” or “down” growth direction) and your last one (and only one of these at most) against the grain (down on an up grain, left on a right, etc.).

Check your blade angle; you neither want it so shallow that it doesn’t remove anything but the lather nor so steep that you’re basically just scraping the sharp edge of the blade perpendicularly across your face rather than “scooping” it under the hairs to be cut.

Consider post-shave treatment regimens. Most rinse with hot, then cold water. A lot of guys (me included) like a brief alum block treatment (rub onto wet skin, let sit 30-60 seconds, then rinse off), but that’s mostly to help with acne, TBH. A cotton-swab application of witch hazel (or a spritz; I bought one of those $1 “TSA Baggies” at walmart that includes a miniature spray bottle) will do a lot to reduce any redness you have caused. Finally, in this nasty winter weather, a bit of face lotion doesn’t hurt! I like Nivea’s Post-Shave Balm, but there are other brands that are very good.


So then we come to stuff that might actually cost you money. I know it would suck after you’ve bought a 50 pack, but really do consider a varied sampler pack of blades. Feathers are sharp–extremely so–which makes them very good at removing hair, but also good at exacerbating any even very minor mistakes you make with technique. It also means they tend to go blunt faster and start giving more ragged shaves. For some guys, that wicked sharpness lets them get the shave done with a minimum of passes and they feel great, but the blades just don’t work for other folks.

I always loved the “smooth” sharpness of Gillette 7’O Clock Super Platinums (Blue casing from Russian plant), but they were discontinued in favor of the far more unreliable black-casing Indian variant (fewer protective sheets around the blade and worse QC means many more subpar blades, basically). I’m now moving into other platinum-coated blades from Russian manufacturers, since it’s likely that there’s only a couple of truly unique production methods at each plant, so maybe one of the others will be a good “lookalike” for the old Gillettes.

Anyway, I’d never have found them if it weren’t for my sampler packs :)


Finally, soap!

I’ve always (personally) found creams easier to work with. This is partially because I’ve got somewhat hard water here at home. This impacts the quality of lather you get from both soap and cream (in fact, you can test it by using some water from a $1 jug of distilled water to wet your face and brush and to build your lather), but since soap needs much more water to start forming good lather, cream is more forgiving. My personal favorite was always Taylor of Old Bond St Avocado, and my gf loves their Rose for her legs. Both of us have pale, sensitive skin and thick, coarse dark hair, so we’re the nightmare scenario for shaving. TOBS is good stuff.

Mitchell’s Wool Fat soap is one of the most-respected and beloved of the hard soaps, but it’s notoriously tricky to work with at first. If you’ve got good lathering technique, it’s possible you won’t be able to buy a better product than this.

I’ve heard a lot of good things about (but have not used) Geo F. Trumper’s line of soaps and creams, including the coconut oil. I’m also a big fan of Queen Charlotte brand personally.


In terms of pre-shave stuff, a little cheaper than an expensive pre-shave lotion would be considering some high-glycerin soap. Whole Foods 365 sells some if you have one near you, but I’ve heard good things about Clearly Natural and have personally used “MRGLO” (Musgo Real Glyce Lime Oil). The idea is to wash your shaving areas with the high glycerin soap (rinse it out before actually lathering) to soften the hair and add even more slickness.


Sadly, I’ve not personally used pre-shave lotions, so I have few recommendations or thoughts there, but I do heartily recommend checking out reddit.com/r/wicked_edge where I learned a lot of my stuff prior to going into Budget Mode and stopping my purchasing “problem” a year or so ago ;). Still trying to work my way through the stuff I’d bought by then, so I guess it’s for the best!

After trying many different blades, these are the ones I settled on and I love them. In my experience, the sharpness makes them much easier on my skin than any other blade I tried.

I’m sure everyone has a favorite. Mine is The Body Shop’s Maca Root Shave Cream:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Body-Shop-Regular-6-3-Fluid/dp/B0036DAIC8/ref=sr_1_1?s=hpc&ie=UTF8&qid=1389041711&sr=1-1&keywords=body+shop+macca+root

A single container of that lasts me a year and a half of almost daily shaving. A tiny pea sized dollop on my brush will lather my face twice over. (Though I generally only need a single pass so the excess lather just gets rinsed away.) It’s a cream so if you get just a dollop on the brush, you can lather it directly on your face. The container is not very elegant looking but it is super clean. (By contrast, someone got me a more traditional shave soap in a gorgeous wooden bowl. It looked fantastic but it was super messy and didn’t lather nearly as well so I switched back after a week.) I should get a commission from The Body Shop given how often I recommend this stuff but, honestly, it’s one of my favorite products.

How often do you guys change your blades?

I will say that I am really enjoying the process of shaving with the new set-up. There’s just a nice feeling from using a nice, heavy, quality chrome safety razor, a nice badger brush, and good soap. Even though at the moment I am mainly just shaving my neck (I have a beard.) I am still getting the hang of it; I can end up with a pretty irritated neck as I figure out the best method, and also as I learn the muscle memory of the best angle of the razor on my skin. I am trying taking a little piece of the Proraso soap and putting it into a mug and whipping up a good lather, rather than trying to just get a decent lather by swirling the wet brush on the soap block in the container itself. And it doesn’t feel or look as thick as I would like it to, but that may just be my technique at this point.

But, as I said, even though it takes longer in the morning than the perfunctory swipes with Edge and a Mach 3, I love the feel of the Edwin Jagger razor in my hand. ;)

This is going to sound astonishingly specific, but when I was using Russian made Gillette 7 O’Clock Super Platinums (blue pack), I got ~4-5 good shaves out of them. The lower-quality Indian ones (black pack) I had to switch to when the Russian factory stopped production only lasted 3 on average. The Gillette Silver Blues I’ve recently switched to (theoretically Russian-made) have been going about 4 apiece.

My least favorite thing about Feathers is that I only got 2-3 smooth shaves out of them, as I think any dulling at all was only made more noticeably by just how sharp they are to start with (this probably also reduces blade durability a little), so I’d get noticeable tugging as some parts of the blade wore down. Others do better with them, but they might have less snaggly facial hair than I do.

Still, at $0.10-$0.15 a pop, not bad, I suppose :D

Jeff, I have a pretty short beard and the Merkur blades usually last me about five shaves (surface around the beard + parts of the mustache that start to overextend).

Amazon charges me $6 for a 10-pack (two years ago they charged $16 for 30).

Hope that helps.

It does. Since I’m still getting the feel for this, I’m not yet sure how the blade should feel and thus when it’s time to change. Sounds like about 5 shaves is a good number to change. The Feathers I’ve got cost about 0.20 each, in a pack of 50, and I shave about 5 times a week, so my blade cost will be about $10 for a year. That beats my old Mach 3 blade costs by more than a little (plus I’m not shaving with a cheap piece of plastic they basically give away to gouge you on expensive gimmick blades. ;) )

I get about 3-4 shaves from Derby blades, but I grow my beard out a good amount before shaving it. I got one of these (http://www.fendrihan.com/derby-doubleedge-safety-razor-blades-p-48.html) a few years back and am still working on it.