A very nice shave indeed. I used this soap from Honeybee Soaps because someone mentioned on Wicked_Edge that he could not get this soap to lather, even when using distilled water. I was surprised, since I regularly get good lathers from Honeybee Soaps, so I took this one down and used the Wet Shaving Products Baroness silvertip since the guy having the problem was using a silvertip.
The Baroness has a very nice soft knot—that is, it is easy to smush. I recently learned that some use “soft” to refer only to the tips themselves, not the brush as a whole—thus a ball bearing wrapped in a soft fabric is “soft” with this definition, as is the proverbial iron fist in a velvet glove. And yet I don’t think of those as “soft.” Both meanings seem to be common use:
: easy to press, bend, cut, etc. : not hard or firm
: smooth and pleasant to touch
I was using the first meaning, he was using the second. (I personally would say that the brushes tips were soft to mean only the tips, and when I saw the brush is soft, I mean the whole knot. But it’s easy to see how the term is ambiguous, so I’m now using “easy to smush” to indicate a soft brush. Of course, even a soft brush is resilient: if you smush the brush, it does spring back into shape. But some brushes are undoubtedly easier to smush than others.)
At any rate, a fine lather ensued. I studied what I was doing to see how it might go awry, and the prime suspect is insufficient loading. It will be interesting to see whether he can figure out the source of the problem.
I loaded the Tech with a Feather blade (mild razor requires sharp blade) and got a very nice BBS shave. A splash of Saint Charles Shave’s Savory Rose, and the week lurches on.
Filed under: Shaving
