I did time my shave this morning, though I did not include rinsing out the brush. Total time from wetting MR GLO before washing my stubble at the sink (following my shower) until I splashed on aftershave was 4 minutes 17 seconds, which surprises me a bit. I thought I was still taking 5 minutes. Of course, subjectively the time has been the same since my shaves took 10 minutes or 20: it takes as long as it takes, shaving carefully, paying attention, and not rushing. I focus on what I’m doing and don’t really pay attention to time passing, which is part of what makes shaving so enjoyable.
A commenter yesterday sounded somewhat shocked, since he takes longer in applying lather and letting it sit on his face and thought, as we tend to do, that his experience was standard. But men vary a lot in all sorts of ways and one of those ways is how tough, thick, coarse, and wiry their stubble grows. My beard is around average in the toughness and thickness department.
At one time I wrote that using a shave stick involved rubbing the stick against the grain over all your (wet, washed) stubble and then brushing. A reader complained about the thickness of the lather he got that way, and in our discussion it turned out that he had a thick, tough, “cheesegrater” beard, and it scraped from the shave stick too much soap for a good lather. I suggested that he rub the shave stick against the grain only in the Van Dyke area around his mouth: chin, moustache, and sides of his mouth. He then used the brush to work up the lather there, then use the lather-filled brush to lather the rest of his beard.
OTOH, men who are just starting to shave have soft, sparse, downy stubble that doesn’t scrape off enough soap for a good lather, so they load the brush directly on the shave stick (as shown in a scene in the 1955 film The Dam Busters, where the air crews are taking the afternoon off before setting off on the raid: one of the men decides that a shave is in order in case his plane goes down and he’s rescued).
Do what works best for you, and never rush your shave. The idea of the annual timed-shaving exercise is just to observe that the clock time required generally drops as experience brings efficiency even if the subjective time doesn’t change.
I used a glycerin-based soap in the tub today, just to see what that lather is like. It’s the same excellent lather as the glycerin-based soap sticks: very creamy and thick—and in this case, redolent of cedar and pin from QED’s Special 218, which I’ll be using again in a couple of weeks. The RazoRock Bruce synthetic did an excellent job, but I now want to try a badger brush with this soap to see if the nature of the lather is affected.
Three passes with the Merkur Progess took very little time, and then a rinse of the razor, a rinse of my face, dry, and a splash of D.R. Harris Marlborough (also a woody fragrance) finished the job.