Sometimes I have a full-on “duh” moment. Today was one.
I’ve been working through a batch of samples of Honeybee Soaps shaving soaps, following this extremely negative review by almightywhacko posted on Reddit’s Wet_Shavers subreddit . As you can see, the review doesn’t leave much room for YMMV, and yet that review is strongly at variance with my own experience with Honeybee Soaps shaving soap.
I was curious to see how common almightwhacko’s experience has been, so I tried collecting the experience of other HBS customers. I also ordered the set of samples I’ve been using this week. While in general I’ve had quite good lathers, but Tuesday’s shave produced a substandard lather: quite sparse by the third pass. In the comments to the post, Ron notes that he himself had had some bad results using the same model of Omega boar brush (the 11575) as I had used in that shave. That observation requires at least three more shaves:
- A shave with the same soap and a different kind of brush; and
- A shave with the same soap and a different brush of the same kind (boar, probably the 20102); and
- A shave with that Omega boar brush and a different soap.
Today I tackled the first of those: using the same lilac soap but with a badger brush—in this case my Rooney Style 2 Finest, a very nice brush indeed. The Rooney Style 2 Super Silvertip ($70 a few years back, $90 now) is an excellent brush, and I had one and loved it. The Finest is indeed somewhat better, but the incremental improvement resulted in a substantial increase in price. However, that’s a common pattern: it costs a certain amount to reach a reasonable level of quality, and incremental improvements beyond that are progressively more expensive. (Check out the price of Purdy shotguns to see how much incremental improvements can cost.)
So today I picked my Rooney Finest silvertip brush and worked up a lather—and wow! what a good lather! Day and night as compared to the lather from the same soap using that Omega boar brush (the Rooney’s lather being the “day” lather, just to be clear). Indeed, after I finished the (three-pass) shave, the brush was still puffy with stored lather (which this brush releases easily):
Not only was the lather better, the fragrance was much more noticeable and (to my nose, at least) very nice indeed. Fragrances, however, are like everything else in shaving, a matter of YMMV.
Sometimes one’s own experience is so vivid and impressive and immediate that one cannot believe that someone else can have a different experience, and the first time one realizes that another has in fact had a very different experience, it’s very hard to process. “You liked that (dish, movie, person, soap, blade, razor)???? You’re lying!” That sort of response.
I hit this some years back, at a time when I still thought, “Yeah, yeah, YMMV, right, I know that,” but had not internalized it. I happened across these blades (Treet carbon steel) just a few months after I had resumed DE shaving. They were cheap (2¢ each at the time) and totally new to this country (Razor & Brush imported them). Till R&B started importing new brands, we were pretty much limited to 5 standard brands and I had tried them all and was using Feathers as the best of what’s available, when I tried the new Treets. Wow!! They immediately took my shave to a new level. They shaved as easily as the Feathers, but more smoothly and with never a nick. It was like a miracle—if you’ve done any serious blade exploration and happened upon a brand that knocks your socks off by the ease, comfort, and smoothness of its shave, you know exactly what I mean.
I immediately wanted to let everyone know: this is the brand of blade that works. (Note: I did know above YMMV in blades, and had seen that some liked blades that I did not, but I somehow had not internalized it—and these blades were so vividly superior!) Well, you can guess what followed: for some, the Treet blades did not work at all, and they felt they had been misled. Kyle, a well-known B&B personality, called the Treets “a tragic waste of metal” (which reveals that he, also, did not understand YMMV: he thought that if they were bad for him, they must be bad for everyone).
But, of course, “YMMV” exactly means that one’s own experience may vary considerably from the experience of others, even though that can be hard to grasp. (Indeed, almightywhacko’s review of HBSS shaving soap is written as though he views his own experience is the true experience, and any differing experience must be a delusion, snare, or prevarication—thus his injunction for everyone to avoid HBS shaving soap and buy Stirling. And yet for me, Stirling soaps are quite problematic and the lather will often collapse; Stirling does work quite well for some, but that certainly does not mean it works well for all. Similarly, Honeybee shaving soap does not work well for almightywhacko, but that does not mean those soaps work poorly for all.). YMMV seems to apply to everything in shaving, even though there may be a preponderance one way or another—for example, I would expect that D.R. Harris shaving soap works well for most, but I would not be surprised to learn that it doesn’t work for some.
When I saw today how very much better the silvertip badger brush worked than the boar brush on the same soap, I had my “duh” moment. Silvertip badger brushes are much more expensive than boar brushes. That means that the invisible hand of the market is willing to pay (substantially) more for silvertip badger. The invisible hand of the market is considered by some to be pretty much an infallible guide: if prices that are artificially high (i.e., in excess of the benefits gained), then those prices must fall as “the market” turns to lower-priced alternatives to keep the cost/benefit ratio acceptable. So of course silvertip badger would perform better than boar—otherwise, everyone would buy boar, since the higher cost of silvertip would produce no benefit.
I personally am not that enamored of “the invisible hand of the free market,” particularly when Libertarians present it as a universal panacea. We see manifold failures of the free market: environmental degradation, refusal to develop medicines for which the market is small or poor (I’m looking at you, ebola vaccine, but many other examples exist), and in general all the government services undertaken for the general welfare that the invisible hand will either not address or screws up abominably (e.g., for-profit hospitals, for-profit schools, for-profit military units like Blackwater).
Still, given the undeniable major difference in lather quality from the silvertip badger brush and the Omega boar, one can certainly see how the invisible hand will pay more for silvertip badger than for boar. I do understand that boar is more readily available (more supply) and thus less costly to obtain, but the fact that the market is willing to value silvertip badger so much more highly means that (overall) the market recognizes the superiority of the brush in terms of its function: making lather.
The next shave will be that same Omega boar brush with a different soap—D.R. Harris, probably—and then a shave using a different boar brush and the Lilac soap. Step by step.
Three passes with the Standard razor holding an Astra Superior Platinum blade, resulting in a BBS result (no nicks), to which I applied a good splash of Pinaud Lilac Vegetal, now well on its way to a pleasant hint of fragrance.
Filed under: Shaving
