When one has been told how to do a repeated task, it takes some practice and experience to discover the absolutely optimal approach. The discovery experience often feels like an extraordinary leap of insight and understanding, and the learner will exclaim, in italics as it were, the very thing he was told, but with the words feeling fresh and vibrant and electric. “Oh! Light pressure!” from a shaver who has been repeatedly told to use light pressure — and who thought he was using light pressure — spoken after the first time he actually does use light pressure.
I’m experiencing some of that in my lather making. Long ago Mantic59 advised shaking the brush until it was barely damp, then start loading the brush, adding very small amounts of water as needed to complete the loading. Once the brush has been loaded, a little more water is generally added as the brush works up the lather (on the face, in a bowl, in a cupped palm).
Only recently have I found the right approach — that is, “right” in the sense not having the optimal lather (without it being runny in the slightest) and — equally if not mor eimportant to me — a process that is interesting to do and observe.
The trick for me was to change the injunction “Wet the knot well under the hot-water tap and then shake the water out until the brush is only slightly damp” to end with “… until the brush is as dray as you can by shaking it.” The loading in this method works best if you have tried to shake all the water out of the brush. (You can’t — the brush will still be slightly damp — but by aiming at “dry” instead of “slightly damp,” I did get all the residual excess water out of the brush.
Then when you brush the soap, nothing much happens. So you add just a tiny amount of water. Note that this water is enjoyed by the tip of the brush, not the inner core. As you brush those few drops of water over the soap, you’ll see a little soap transferred from puck to brush. Add another tiny amount of water and brush again. Wieth another two or three repetitions, you will have gotten and good amount of soap loaded into the top of the knot and no extra water in the interior.
At this point I brush a good coating of lather over all my stubble (which has already been wetted and rubbed with a dot of Grooming Dept Moisturizing Pre-Shave, and then splashed a bit with more water). Once the stubble is fully coated, I added one more small amount of hot water to the tip of the brush and work that in.
The process doesn’t take so long as this detailed description might make you think, and in any case once you learn it, practice will make you efficient. What I particularly like about this approach, beyond the quality of lather I get, is observing the stages of loading the brush.
(It reminds of a science-fiction short-story or novella or novel that I read decades ago, in which the protagonist, who was meditating by observing the stages water goes through as it comes to a boil, enters the mindset that the alien overlords want, whereupon he is harvested and incorporated into the network of humans the aliens have built. But although he was meditating, he is essential a wolf, not a sheep, and he awakens from the state in which the aliens put him, and leads the usual successful rebellion. I cannot remember enough to find the title, but the story was anthologized for sure, probably in New Tales of Space and Time, or one of Groff Conklin‘s anthologies.)
With lather in place my Eros slant did its usual superb job — and this razor enjoys and rewards light pressure (the sort of pressure that you’re told, and you still have trouble, and then when you finally get it right, you say, “Oh! Light pressure. Why didn’t you say so?”)
Three passes left my face perfectly smooth and undamaged, and a splash of Chatillon Lux’s aftershave toner in the matching fragrance left me ready to face the day — a dark day that may well see the fall of snow. Hope you are warm and dry.
