I have a full beard. This was pretty cool back in college but it is just a pain now. I have to shave regularly or I start to look shabby but shaving every day really irritates my skin, especially my neck.
As someone who likes to try new things, I have been curious about "sophisticated" shaving kits that are getting more attention recently. Nice razors, that funny brush thing and shaving soaps. I've been curious about them but not curious enough to actually purchase one. Recently I did switch to an expensive shaving cream from Aveda (I used Edge for decades), which took a while to get used but gives a good shave and is softer on my skin.
Here is a great article that sings the praises of these old fashioned shaving methods. I havent seen an actual razor blade since my grandfather died but it sounds like I might be buying some of my own soon.
How to get that perfect shave
Latest trends and products to avoid those nicks and cuts
Jan 30, 2005
The perfect shave has three ingredients: a good razor, a good brush, and glycerin-based shaving cream.
A shaving brush isn’t just a paint brush for your face. A good brush – and the best brushes are made of badger hair and start at $25 – absorbs hot water and then, after you dip the tip of the brush into your tub (yes, not a can, but a tub – I’ll explain later) the brush releases and mixes the hot water with the shaving cream as you skim the brush back and forth across your face and neck in and up-down motion. The combination of hot water mixing with the cream and getting beaten by the brush all over your face delivers a thicker, richer, more emollient lather that’s impossible to get with your fingers alone. A shaving brush also gently exfoliates, or removes the dead skin, from your face before shaving, which gets rid of anything coming between the blade and your whiskers. Finally, the up-down brushing lifts your whiskers and suspends them standing upright in the thick lather, which exposes the maximum whisker length to your blade as it skims along your face.
Genuine badger hair shaving brushes come in all sizes and hair types, costing anywhere from $25 for a basic pure-grade badger model to $550 for a monster-sized, high-end English hand-made job containing only the hair from the badger’s neck, which is said by some (though not by me) to be the finest and most rarefied expression of water-holding bristle known to man or badger.
The next tool you need for wetshaving is a razor. And by razor, I mean whatever high-quality, NON-DISPOSABLE razor you feel most comfortable with. I know, I know, disposables are cool because that’s what they hand out in jail, but they’re extremely hard on your skin because the quality of the blades isn’t as good as a cartridge razor, or better yet, the kind of razor that serious wetshavers use: the classic double-edge safety razor!
A DE razor is the kind that takes a single, disposable razor blade, and it’s the same type of razor that your father, your grandfather, Cary Grant, Lee Marvin, JFK, and John Wayne used, and in the opinion of many shave-o-philes, the classic DE wipes the floor with any modern razor. I entirely concur – ever since I switched to using a DE razor, instead of a multi-blade cartridge razor, I get much closer and more comfortable shaves, my face doesn’t burn at all anymore, and all the red irritation on my neck I thought was there for good went away completely.
