I thought yesterday’s shave was BBS, but I now realize that it was merely extremely smooth. There is indeed a difference in razors: the Yuma (under $2) does not shave so well as the iKon S3S (north of $200 and currently unavailable). The S3S has a massive head, which helps, and the head design provides excellent comfort and high efficiency: you more or less erase the stubble by passing over it, and it seems impossible to give yourself a nick or razor burn. (Full disclosure: I didn’t in fact try, but I did move the razor briskly over my face without a care or concern.) The blade was a Gillette 7 O’Clock Super Platinum—a good brand for me, apparently—and BBS started to appear even in the first pass; by the third, the BBS regions had joined into one, covering my entire beard area.
The S3S, BTW, is one of a handful of razors that have the alignment lugs on the baseplate rather than in the cap; with such razors, you load the baseplate and place cap over it rather than the usual practice of loading the cap and placing the baseplate over the blade (making sure that the orientation is correct: scalloped guard toward the blade).
But first, of course, there was the lather, which definitely helped. My Vie-Long brush (boar? horse? hard to say, but I soak it in advance) did its usual wonderful job. This is the brush that BullgooseShaving.com called the Bombito, and Vie-Long says that it’s boar. (The brush seems no longer to be available. Too bad: it was $15 and a dynamite brush.)
The asses’ milk shaving soap did its usual great job. This is an excellent soap to keep in mind if you go to Paris.
A splash of Paul Sebastian, and we enter the waiting room for the weekend.
Filed under: Shaving
