For the GQ Guy in All of Us
I know a lot of guys my age I’ve talked with have wanted to try shaving with an authentic straight razor, mainly because shaving with something so openly clumsy and dangerous just has a cool badass edge to it that’s hard to pass up. I definitely considered trying it at one point.
I think the general verdict is that it’s not worth it. Too much chance of a bad cut, hard to hold and line up correctly, sharpening is inconvenient, etcetera.
What I would recommend, from very recent personal experience, is to pick up a decent shaving brush and soap. The pros online are saying badger hair is the best; I don’t know (the store here only had one, which seems good enough though very cheap).
I’m using this stuff for soap, which seems pretty good and I believe is available in the US at least online. If you can get the cake-style soap and accompanying (properly-sized) bowl, that would probably be better. I think Wal-Mart carries something like this stuff.
You lather up old school, which while obviously unable to match the Dirty Dozen-esque masculine intensity of the straight razor, has a pleasant feel and seems to work quite nicely, even with a fairly basic disposable safety razor.
This stick deal that I got is wetted, as is your skin, then you kind of rub it directly on the skin until you have a good film spread out, then in comes the well-wetted brush (linear sweeps worked best for me) to lather stuff up a bit. The cake stuff, as far as I read, involves taking the wetted brush directly to the soap in the dish, forming up a decent lather and then going to the face with the soapy brush. This is the barbershop way to go about things.
A post-shave upstroke on the mustache/goatee area proves a much closer shave than with the space-age gel. The soap coating is much thinner, more soap-like than the whipped cream puff of the canned stuff. The accumulation on the blade is blessedly minimal. The blade glides very well, and honestly just being able to see what you’re doing unobstructed by a mounding marshmallow foam helps ensure you won’t have to go back for seconds all that often.
Have some after-shave on hand. Not sure if it’s because I shaved twice today to test the stuff out, but a little cooling blue helped things out a bit afterwards.