Has anyone ever experimented with stropping their safety razors? A friend of mine posted this amusing video on another board last year:
Once you get past the unintentional comedy of the video itself, it kind of makes sense if what he’s doing is basically stropping the blades. My friend actually tried it with his disposable razors and found that there was indeed something to it. I keep meaning to test it on my safety razors but I generally forget/decide I can’t be bothered after a day or two.
I use Feathers and they last about a week. (Some are sharper than others.) By the end of the week they are starting to get dull. And then I use them for another 3 or 4 days because I shave in the shower and never remember that I need a new blade until I start to shave by which point I don’t feel like getting water all over the bathroom while I go for a new blade. (Inevitably, though, this is exactly what happens after three or four days of dull razor shaving.)
I’m still going through a variety pack I ordered over a year ago, and so it changes with every brand. Fresh Feathers are awesome, but I feel like I can only get about 3 good shaves out of the blades. The Gillette’s are holding up pretty well but I don’t like the shaves nearly as much (though, good enough for most days IMO).
I imagine it’s got to be harder to get the angle right on a single-bladed double-edged safety razor, just because, since the head doesn’t automatically tilt to a fairly optimum angle like a Mach 3 or whatever would, you’d have to find the right angle to strop yourself. With so little blade exposed (and no good way to do a backwards strop to get the “bottom” of the blade, due to the edge guard being in the way), it’d be a real bear to get the angle by sight, much less do it consistently.
I dunno, I guess I feel like at $0.02 - $0.07/shave (depending on brand and longevity based on answers in this very thread), I am a lot less keen on wringing every last bit of life out of them.
Now that, said, I did use to do the jean trick with my Mach 3 back in the day. Then again, everytime I used it, I’d have no idea how old the blade was (hated shaving, so only did it when absolutely necessary, with long, memory-fogging gaps in between), and it got to the point where every shave was a rash-inducing agony. Not sure if that was a function of jean-sharpening being BS or if it was just because I was trying to hack off 1/2 an inch with a two-year-old Mach 3 cartridge and a handful of year-old Edge gel ;)
Well, I’ve heard of corking DE blades, hand stropping, glass hones, etc. My bf picked up a glass hone on ebay, and he said it worked for him. I guess it depends on the blade you use (the coating etc.). He uses really rough Chinese Dinosaur blades.
Has anyone tried the executive from dollar shave club? I received a gift card for the store and am debating between that and the 4 blade model.
I tried the 6-blade but found that the blades were too close together and it was always getting clogged. Now I get the 4-blade ones, works much better.
OK, I’ve got my Edwin Jagger safety razor, my Parker badger bristle brush, and my Proraso soap. Love the feel of the heavy chrome razor, I enjoy using the brush, even though I only shave my neck for the most part since I have a full beard. It does take longer than using my Mach whatever and gel, but I enjoy it for some reason. My only question: the soap.
I see some sites that say you should only cut a nickle size piece of the soap and put that in the cup and use it to make the foam, others seem to just wet the brush and use it directly on the soap to create the lather. I tend to get inconsistent results and I’m not sure the lather is as effective as it could be, but that is from someone who has been using cans of shaving gel for years.
So - what shaving soap do you guys using safety razors prefer, and what techniques? Thanks.
I use Tabac Original. After wetting my brush and squeezing it out, I wet my fingers and dampen the surface of my soap, then I load the brush on the soap and make the lather in my bowl, adding water or reloading the brush as necessary to get to a proper lather. (If there are bubbles big enough to be visible as such, you’ve got too much water in the mix.)
Jeff, I am the same as you – a can cream guy for a lifetime. I started using soap last year. I just buy the kind in the little tub, warm up my brush with hot water, and use the tub to mix it up. When I’m done, I just put the cap on the tub and rinse it all off. I get the occasional hair in the tub if I need a touch up of cream once I’ve started, but it doesn’t bother me, especially since I can just put the lid back on and forget it until next time.
Not sure if that’s too helpful, but I’m curious what other folks do. What do you mean by inconsistent results? I don’t find the cream as thick and substantial as what you get from a can, but it’s always the same runny mess, so I don’t know. It seems to protect my face as well as the can stuff, despite difference in texture.
Well I got to work to day and suddenly realized I had forgotten to shave. Damn.
JeffL:
With a cream, it sorta depends. With a tube cream (e.g., this Proraso product), I’d squirt a bit into a small bowl or, lacking that, the palm of my hand, and whip it into lather with a moist brush. With a tub cream, (such as this Taylor of Old Bond Street product), a moist brush swirled a second or three in the midst of the cream is enough to pick up enough to build a lather directly on my face, in a separate bowl, or in my palm. Building the lather directly with either cream isn’t really possible: the tube provides no surface to swish over, while the tub of soft cream isn’t great since you’d keep picking up more and more of the stuff while you lathered.
With a harder cream/soap hybrid (like this Proraso product) or a full soap (like this Crabtree & Evelyn product) I like to wetten the surface for 30-60 seconds before starting to create a thin layer of softened soap on the top. You can just drizzle some water on there, or if the soap’s in a large enough container, pour water over it and then drain when you’re ready to begin. Swirl a moist brush over it for 30-45 seconds to “load” the brush–since it’s noticeably harder than a cream, it will take longer to build up a good amount on the brush. From there, you can lather it up in your palm, directly on your face, in a separate bowl, or–if there’s enough “clearance” in the soap existing container, right on top of the soap itself (since it does take so long to “scrape up” soap, you shouldn’t have to worry about overloading it).
I’d probably rate palm lathering lowest–it’s just messy and obnoxious if you normally use your free hand to pull your skin around with, although it does make “feeling” the consistency of the lather much easier–and then say you have about even odds between face lathering and bowl-lathering. Face is faster, but it can be harder to really whip up a massive mound of creamy lather on the ol’ mug without covering your counter, ears, eyebrows, and mouth in it. Bowl takes a little extra time (~45-60 seconds to lather in the bowl, then another 15-20 to apply to the face from there), but you have somewhere logical for all the excess lather to sit between passes, letting you scoop up more if your brush itself runs low.
Edit: worth noting that I used all the above linked products personally and can vouch for the methods described for each based on my experience with my fairly hard Raleigh water. If you live somewhere with even harder water than me, I might recommend you avoid hard soaps and stiff creams (Proraso bowls and designer products like Queen Charlotte Soaps shave cream), as getting a really thick lather is difficult with hard water. Creams will lather well with almost anything anywhere. Also, the Proraso I linked above appears to have received a refreshed product (search Amazon for “proraso sensitive,” but since I don’t know if the formula changed along with the packaging, I’m hesitant to link it in the above explanations as it may not necessarily still be a “stiff cream”).
That’s all the rage these days. In my office, everyone has a beard but me and Erin.
I’ve recommended my favorite cream so many times that I won’t mention it by name and will instead link to my previous recommendation:
A pea sized dab on my brush is enough to work up a thick lather directly on my face with enough left on the brush for a second pass if desired.
After sampling a few things (not exhaustive, as I still haven’t tried a bunch of other people’s favorites) but my favorite is RazoRock Classic cream. A little pea sized drop smeared into a bowl and lathered with a badger brush goes a long way, 2+ passes (maybe more). And on Armando’s suggestion, I also really like the Taylor of Old Bond Street creams well. Since I have hard water where I live, the creams tend to lather better than the soaps.
Ok so I ordered this shave cream today, after a lifetime of barbasol usage, I hope its as good as you say! :)
I shave twice a week , so it should probably last me for 10 years.
I use the 4X from Dollar Shave Club my own self, and absolutely love it.
Me too on the Razorock Classic. I just re-ordered that, plus trying their Almond … and some Taylor of Old Bond street (sandalwood). These are the ones I like best after some experimentation over the past couple years.
I save so much money on using shaving soap or creams etc, that I almost feel bad because I do not get to purchase various kinds. I wish they sold a pack of smaller containers so I could rotate the different smells.