Clayton talks about the old days of Burma Shave, a brushless shaving cream. A pox on the Burma Shave house! While I might like Clayton’s Burma Shave-style marketing gun rights idea, I’m in the Kim Du Toit camp when it comes to shaving:
Right now, I shave with an old-fashioned bowl of old-fashioned shaving soap, an old-fashioned badger-bristle shaving brush, and one of those damn newfangled multi-blade razors. The razor is my sole concession to modernity, and while I appreciate its utility, it’s not the same as shaving with an old-fashioned straight (“cut-throat”) razor, or even a single-blade “safety†razor. Yeah, those
2345-bladed thingies work well—maybe even better than the older razor types; but since when was I all about efficiency trumping tradition, anyway?
I pretty much do the same thing. Badger hair brush, shaving mug, and whatever fine English shaving cream I happen to have at the time. I do use a cartridge razor as well, because it’s just easier, and it works well. But you don’t know good shaving until you’re lathering up your face with a dead-badger-on-a-stick’s worth of Taylor of Old Bond Street’s rose scented shaving cream. Taylor’s is very easy on the face, provides a good shave, smells fabulous, and washes clean out of the razor. To me, this is the great feature. With modern shaving creams, if you don’t have power washer level pressure coming out of your sink, it’s a nightmare trying to get the blades clean.
So no Burma Shave for me. I’ll stick to my badger killing brush and fine smelling traditional shaving creams. If you’d like to order some yourself, my favorite place to get some is Vintage Blades, LLC. He set up a booth at the big Harrisburg Gun Show, which is how I found out about him.
Enh – my method is a 3-blade package in the shower. (There’s something terribly wrong with both me and that sentence, I suppose).
I use a Mach-3 razor with Gillette Edge shaving gel. I like the way the gel can be frothed up on the face, without the use of a shaving brush. For aftershave, I use a Nivea lotion, which is just the best. Before I discovered Nivea, my neck would break out in a bad rash by the end of the day.
I like the smell of the old-fashioned English shaving creams, and I think the badger brush is pretty cool. I’d like to get a shave at one of those “men’s salons” with one before I put the money down for new equipment. Besides, I only shave regularly for 6 months out of the year, so I want to make sure that any new stuff will make that much of a difference.
That badger-hair brush will lose its (highly limited) snob appeal once you have to pack it away wet while traveling, only to emerge green at the base and with moldy bristles later. Heck, that’s why Burma-Shave (1925) and Barbasol (1919) first appeared as brushless shaving creams, to get rid of Grandpa’s nasty-smelling badger-hair brush and shaving mug!!
I go modern when I travel :)