I was thinking (I know that's dangerous
) and I decided to try something a little different. I've been on this 3 pass / 2 pass alternating shave schedule for a while now. My thoughts were that there isn't much difference between my 2 pass w/ clean-up and a straight up 3 pass shave with minimal clean-up. In fact, I thought maybe a nice smooth 3rd pass might just have less of a chance of being irritating than extensive clean-up with the 2 pass shave. Let's see if I'm right.
Today's Shave: Shave #115
Razor: Parker Variant - Graphite handle
Blade: Gillette Silver Blue
Brush: Eric's Lignum Vitae Hand Turned Brush Handle, 22 mm Boss Knot
Soap: Mystic Water Lavender Lime
Bowl: Red Salsa Bowl (plastic)
Pre Shave: Wash with soap in the shower . Rub raw soap on face from the puck.
Total Razor on Face Time: 11 minutes
Post Shave: Cold water rinse, Witch Hazel (Walmart Brand) face only, Cold rinse. Every Man Jack AS balm to the face only. Bootlegger's Bay Rum mammoth splashing.
I really got a good lather this morning. One thing I've changed in the last week with the lathering was that I get the brush wet with hot water before going to the puck of shaving soap. Being a cold water shaver, I tended to use cold water for this in the past. I've found that the hot / warm water on this particular brush knot makes loading easier. The downside (if you can call it that) is that I'm getting a little proto-lather going on in the soap puck container. No biggy, I just wipe all that proto-lather out and place it in my bowl before starting to build the lather. I've found I don't need to go back for more soap product now. I think the knot is quite stiff and the hot water helps soften it a little bit more so I can get more soap up in the brush - I could be wrong though.
Let's get to the shave......WTG pass felt great at 3.3 or so on the razor setting. I opted for a tad lower just in case this experiment back-fired and it proved too much to do back to back 3 pass shaves. The second XTG/ATG pass was at a setting of 2.5 and worked well. Wow, without doing clean-up along the way my passes go a lot faster! My 3rd pass was at 2.5 setting & was ATG/XTG. It felt great, but I could feel a lot of areas that were still maybe in the DFS- zone.
So with the clean-up it's really easy to say you are going to limit it and not do it. I decided to only do clean-up for 90 seconds max. I set the razor at 1.5 and began blade buffing areas on my cheeks, neck and around my mouth. I wrapped it up somewhere around 70-75 seconds. I ended up with a solid BBS- in most areas with a few DFS+ areas on my neck. No irritation and a great shave. So far, the experiment is working well but only time will tell if it causes irritation after something like the 5th 3 pass shave in a row. What I feel I really learned today is that you get smooth through several passes and you have to tell yourself that you still have 2 more passes to go to reduce your beard growth to where you want to be. My previous thought while shaving was to get everything you can with each pass and to get it as smooth as possible with each pass. Now I'm realizing that though I'm rinsing after the first pass and feeling a lot of roughness still present, I'll feel less after the 2nd pass, and almost none after the 3rd pass. Some might read this and say "Well duh Mike, yeah it's a reduction process" and they'd be right to say that. Knowing something and putting it to practice are two different things sometimes and my pursuit for smoothness kinda short circuited my common sense. Sometimes stepping back and thinking about your shave routine has value and really I started this journal so that people can see me progress and figure stuff out. I think there's value in it for newbies as they read my ideas that didn't work and my struggles / successes. Sometimes I think I should just stop journaling because most days its the same shave which I think is boring reading, but what keeps me going is that there might be that new guy starting out that gets something out of it seeing that I shaved the same for weeks and then had another breakthrough.
I must say, I've figured out that citrus scented soaps do not mammoth paint with effectiveness. I get little to no scent retention with citrus soaps, so today I did not mammoth paint. I did mammoth splash though
I put some Bootleggers Bay Rum AS on the mammoth hair and it works well.
