I decided to try a travel possibility. Using a shave stick with a boar brush is guts ball—boar brushes may well require more soap to load than your stubble scrapes off the shave stick—but I felt comfortable with this set-up. My Wee Scot (from the pre-Vulfix Simpson) has amazing capacity and D.R. Harris makes a great lather. And you can always load the brush directly from the shave stick, treating it as an extremely thick puck of narrow diameter.
Shave sticks are, IMO, fun to use and good for travel. Not everyone can use them: men who are just starting to shave have fine, downy stubble that will not scrape off enough soap for a good loading. And men with thick, coarse, tough, dense, cheese-grater beards find that if they rub the shave stick against the grain all over their beard (as I do), they will have poor lather because it’s just too much soap. Such men generally rub the stick against the grain only in the Van Dyke area—moustache and chin—and work up the lather there initially, then work it into the rest of the beard.
If you’ve not tried a shave stick, give it a go sometime. The D.R. Harris format, with the screw-off top and the extendible stick, is particularly good since the soap is protected. Some artisans also use the same general type of container for their shave sticks, but those are substantially larger than the D.R. Harris shave stick.
A really fine lather quickly arose as I brushed my face with the damp brush, and the 102 made easy work of the shave: very smooth and comfortable and my face almost totally BBS at the end of the second pass. A final pass left my face BBS, and the splash of Alt-Innsbruck was a very pleasant finish.
Filed under: Shaving
