Life and work have been crazy with the wedding, followed by a baby shower all in conjunction with proposal due dates. Luckily, on of the proposal due dates was postponed by two weeks, so no I have a couple of days of breathing room. I'm not going to try to get caught up on over two weeks worth of shaves except to say that I did have to throw in 2, ATT SE2 shaves into the mix due to being rushed a couple of mornings. Both shaves were very good indeed, on a blade that I have no idea as to how many shaves I have on it. I am currently running a Feather Pro in this razor. Mild and efficient are the best adjectives that come to mind to describe the shave.
I am still cycling through the three BRW razors in my den, and after each shave, I am always amazed at what a good job each one is doing. For example, this morning I went with the 7/8" barber's notch with 2 days of growth, and was rewarded with a comfortable full BBS with no irritation or weepers. Just a fun shave to perform, and an excellent result that I am still faceterbating.
A quick moment and a comment on grail shaves. Rarely do I experience a grail worthy shave of late. I think that the reasons are two-fold. First, and I hate to say it here, my life has taken me to a point where I am looking at shaving as more of a utilitarian requirement rather than exercising a hobby. Since I came back to traditional wet shaving in the fall of 2014, I mainly looked at my morning shaves fulfilling my hobby interests, that and trying to learn the straight razor to become completely proficient with it. Lately (7+ months), my life has gotten very busy, and my morning shave is just that, a morning shave. My preferred tool is still the traditional straight razor, and even though I am shaving for the pure utilitarian goal of removing my whiskers, I still do enjoy very much the straight razor shave including all of the maintenance that goes along with the ritual. Never do I view the morning shave as a chore as I did back in those cart. decades. However, I rarely chase that grail worthy shave, and as such, I rarely receive on.
The other reason I think that I rarely get a grail shave with a straight razor any more is that I have gotten a lot of very good straight razor shaves since 2015 when I first started getting good at them. Today it takes a very good shave indeed to impress me, and to rank it in the top 5% of all straight razor shaves. In other words, I have raised the bar very high indeed to rank a shave as grail worthy. My normal shave routine is a two pass shave with a third pass on two difficult spots that require a different direction, followed by a water only cleanup. I am fairly efficient with this shave, and sometimes my mind wanders and I don't pay as much attention as I could on the finer angles and feel of the shave. Hence, sometimes I leave the house at DFS+, sometimes I leave the house at full BBS, and the difference seems to be how focused I am through the entire process. But I have to say, grail worthy to me does not come along very often.
