My favorite of the Mickey Lee soaps I’ve tried is The Drunken Goat. This morning I got a very nice lather (with that wonderful TDG fragrance) using my Rooney Victorian Super Badger. (“Super Badger,” like other badger classifications, is simply a manufacturer category — there is no standardization of badger classification, though there’s rough agreement on general categories: for example, no one calls a knot with a dark body and cream-colored tips “pure badger,” a name reserved for a lower-quality knot.)
This knot has extremely soft tips — hooked tips that when wet become like thick wet velvet — so that I did not get the same textured feeling that the brushes used in the past few days provided. This brush has the same smoothness of a good synthetic, but with more resilience, partly due (I imagine) to the shorter loft.
And I did enjoy the fragrance. I hope that Mickey Lee will grant (in exchange for royalties) a license to some good artisanal soapmaker to make The Drunken Goat using the ML formula. It could be a limited-term license (e.g., a five-year license) if Mickey Lee thinks he might return to soapmaking. I hate to see The Drunken Goat off the market altogether. It was an inspired creation.
Three passes with the Fine Marvel, here on a UFO handle, and then a splash of The Drunken Goat aftershave to finish the job. Great way to start Friday.