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Success with the Wetshave

berkeley

Yes, this is another shaving post. Deal with it.

Success. Today I had my first completely successful wetshave. It's a remarkable thing, really. To know that you don't have to buy Gillette or any other company's crappy products... to know that your shave will be comfortable and fun... to relish in doing things right... and to use high-quality products that feel good, smell good and make you feel good. That's a bit of what it's like to be able to pull off a good wetshave. Feels kind of like when I learned how to really drive a manual transmission; there's just no going back.

I'll describe what works for me in this post. First, the accoutrements:

a shaving mug, safety razor, boars hair brush and two types of cream

  • A lather mug. The mug should be pretty wide, a small bowl works too.
  • Real shaving cream. I really like the Geo F. Trumper Violet and Rose creams... very good lather and amazing fragrance.
  • A good safety razor with good blades. I use a Merkur Hefty Classic with Merur platinum-coated blades; they stay sharp and end up costing about 50 cents a pop.
  • A badger's hair brush with a stand. Boar's hair apparently holds water well and you need the stand so that it can dry when you're done using it.

Here's my approach to a step-by-step wetshaving process. Nothing is very novel; it's just what works for me. The key is wet... you want it as much lather and water as you can possibly stand:

  1. Shave after taking a hot shower. As they say, hot water opens up your pores. Don't dry your face; make sure it stays wet.
  2. Run hot water (not scalding) in the sink and splash the hot water to rewet your face just in case any evaporation has happened.
  3. Turn the water up to the hotest it will go and plug your drain. Douse the shaving brush in the water so that it gets very wet. Drop the brush into the water in the sink.
  4. Put an inch-long cylinder of shaving cream in your mug.
  5. Take brush out of the water and run under the running water again. Let the brush drain until the steady stream of water stops. Shake it gently once.
  6. Put brush in mug and use circular motions (both ways) to work up a lather... you'll know your done when there's a good lather on the brush and the lather in the cup is starting to peak just a bit.
  7. Apply lather to your face with the brush in up-and-down motions. It's amazing how precise you can be with a brush given enough time... you can get every millimeter of your face lathered and no millimeter of your face that you don't want lathered with practice.
  8. Check your safety razor. Make sure that the blade is firmly screwed down onto the razor. If it is not, the edge of the blade can stick out a bit and you will cut yourself.
  9. Put teeth of your razor at a ninety degree angle to your upper cheeck and tilt the blade up until you feel the razor catch. Slowly let the razor "fall" down your cheek, don't pull. Adjust angle such that you get a good shave. Only use large strokes if you don't have much growth.
  10. Continue shaving going with the grain of your hair and washing off your razor in the pool of water after every few strokes. This is very important. With most men's faces, the grain points downward until about halfway down the neck, where it switches to growing upward. Shaving against the grain is for fools and can really hurt and cause other problems. Only shave each part of your face once, you can come back later if you need to.
  11. After you're done with your first pass, check and see if you need another pass or need to touch anything up. If so, relather your face and do it again, paying attention to details this time.
  12. Once you're done, let the water out of the sink. Run the water warm and rinse out your mug and brush. Make sure to gently open the brush to get into where soap can hide in the middle of the brush. Put brush back in drying stand. Use the now clean mug to rinse down the sides of the sink.
  13. Run the water very cold. Cup your hands and splash very cold water onto your face and neck many times (4 or 5).
  14. Dry off your face with a towel... don't rub but pat. Your face is very tender here and rubbing will only worsen it.
  15. Apply aftershave of your choice. When your face is dry, apply a moisturizer of some sort.
  16. Clean up the sink so that it doesn't look like a squirrel jumped in a blender.

UPDATE [2008-01-14T22:57:33]: I had said "boar's" hair above for the brush when, of course, I meant badger. If you've read this far, you must check out Mark's shaving videos on YouTube: