A really good shave this morning. Several things I was checking: brush, soap, and razor. (No check on aftershave, but I’m going to have to get a new bottle of this one soon.)
On Wicked Edge I was discussing brushes and brush preferences. Some like a brush whose knot tends to the stiff and scrubby: dense knots with a lot of resilience. Others, like me, enjoy knots that are a soft as a fluffy pillow, though still having good resilience: a fluffy pillow easy to compress that regains it shape when pressure is released.
The difference is in preference, not performance: both types of brush can make good lather efficiently as you learn them. And it’s good to note that one’s preferences are in general discovered rather than decided: if you’ve not used any shaving brush, you won’t know your preference until you try a few.
The brush shown is one of my softer knots, on a snakewood handle, a brush I bought from StropShoppe.com. This morning I used with with a Barrister & Mann soap, and regular readers may recognize the Vanille as the soap I tossed into the dustbin after being frustrated by yet another fading lather, a problem I’ve had periodically with several soaps: initially, Mike’s Natural, then with Barrister & Mann, Stirling, and Green Mountain. (I later retrieved the soap after I calmed down.)
With Mike’s Natural, I figured out the problem was insufficient water, and by adding water as I loaded the brush, I got a very fine lather indeed. This morning I remembered that approach, and I tried it with the Vanille—and the lather was stupendous. A really great lather, thick, creamy, lubricating, and ample: lots for each pass, lots left at the end.
Here’s how I did it: wet the knot well, give it a little shake to lower the initial water content, and start brushing the puck. The brush will quickly start picking up soap. Add a small driblet of water to the brush, and resume brushing the puck. The lather being formed as the brush is loaded will increase a little, but since only a small amount of water was added, it won’t increase much. Add another small driblet of water, and resume loading the brush on the puck.
I think I added quite small amounts of water three times this morning, and by the end, the brush was quite well loaded and the lather had a very pleasing consistency. I worked up the lather a bit more on my beard, and was totally satisfied by the lather’s quality and quantity.
That’s the secret for me: starting with a damp brush and adding small amounts of water as I load the brush. I’m very glad that I retrieved this excellent soap from the dustbin.
Now, the razor: In comparing the shave with this Feather AS-D1 and the shave day before yesterday with the loaner, I do see that Feather did indeed have a quality-control problem with the D1: they were (apparently) unable to produce a consistent razor. (Edward Deming, in Out of the Crisis, points out that reducing variation to obtain consistency is the first step in any quality-control program.) Feather failed the test of consistency with the D1, as is obvious from the very different shaves from the loaner and my own D1.
I must have lucked out with a good one: an easy shave and BBS result. But the other D1 seemed quite often to stop cutting altogether. It may be that the “good” angle was in too narrow a range, but too often the razor simply slid through the lather, apparently cutting nothing. That problem did not arise at all with my own D1: I could always feel the cutting, with every stroke. The razor is extraordinarily comfortable (“mild,” in that sense) but also extraordinarily efficient with a Feather blade (“aggressive,” in that sense). The loaner D1 simply doesn’t match the performance.
I assume that this was the quality problem that led to the D2. I don’t have a D2, but so far I’ve not heard negative reports about its performance, so my hope is that the problem was fixed.
A good splash of Alt-Innsbruck, and tonight I set the clocks back.
Filed under: Shaving
