It shows some faith in the brush to use a shave stick: to a degree, you rely on the brush to hold sufficient lather for the shave (though you can in fact reload the brush if needed by brushing the shave stick), which is why I wouldn’t use a new boar brush with a shave stick: new boar brushes don’t hold lather well and in fact seem to destroy it.
With the Wee Scot, I had no qualms about using a shave stick, and D.R. Harris shave sticks are really excellent: packaged well for travel with a screw-off lid and a twist-to-extend soap, plus the wonderful D.R. Harris lather. This morning is a good example: I rubbed the shave stick soap against the grain over all my beard (guys with extremely dense and tough beards generally rub the stick only on the Van Dyke area, else they end up with too much soap on the face), and then I brushed briskly with the damp Wee Scot: loads of lather quickly arose, and the Wee Scot held plenty for this shave and, if I could preserve it, the next as well.
This stainless slant is the first slant iKon made. It’s good but, for me, somewhat nicky, so I used a Derby Extra blade. I note that this slant tends to get tea stains on the inside from some rusting of the blade, and I would be that’s why iKon now coats this slant (the B1 coating nowadays, though earlier iKon used a Diamond-Like Carbon coated version of this same head, which I have) and also a motivation for moving to aluminum-alloy heads (the Shavecraft line, which include the 102 and X3 slants).
The shave was excellent and close, though I still got two very tiny nicks—mere dots. One was in the WTG pass and the other later. My Nik Is Sealed took care of that and a good splash of the Marlborough aftershave finished the job to start the week on a very nice note.
Filed under: Shaving
