Exceptionally smooth shave. The Speick shaving soap shown was a gift from an Australian reader. (Not shipped from Australia, I hasten to add: it’s a German soap purchased on-line and shipped to me from the vendor, ItalianBarber.com in this case.) Many thanks, Eddie.
Speick products I’ve tried have been uniformly of high quality and excellent performance, and today’s soap was no exception: a very nice lather, and the clean fragrance of Speick is quite refreshing. I did have a lather problem with the brush shown—either I didn’t load it sufficiently, or its lathercidal tendencies have returned, or both. After the first pass, very little lather. So I worked up a lather with my Plisson Chinese Grey and had no further problems at all: loads of lather for two more passes and still going strong at the end of the shave.
I’m continuing to try palm lathering: go with a damp rather than a wet brush, load the brush until it contains a kind of soap paste, then brush my palm vigorously, occasionally extending it under a dribble of hot water from the tap as if accepting alms of water, working that in, going for another alm of water (“an alm for the palm”), working that in, and so on. The resulting lather is really exceptional and a couple of artisan soaps I had thought were sort of mediocre have responded with amazingly good lather. Live and learn, eh? I’m rewriting the lather section now.
The iKon slant produces an absolutely perfect BBS result with nary a nick, and a good splash of the excellent Speick aftershave splash finished the shave. The week is already off to a good start.
Filed under: Shaving
