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The Heysi Missive
- Thread starter heysi
- Start date
@NurseDave Look our little boy is all Grown up.... brings a tear to my eye.... Oh wait that was a Jalapeno
NOW, wait for it to magically break down on your face to nothing! Good video Steven! I love the vintage Crabtree and Evelyn, but this one... I'm a 100% face latherer, so this technique doesn't really fall within my wheelhouse. It still kind of looked really airy and fluffy. Now myself, I prefer a thicker wet lather. It was SUPER difficult to get anything out of C&E Moroccan Myrrh Cira 2015, which I could use for straight razor shaving. My experience was a really tacky lather that would almost instantly dry to your face. If you tried adding more water to give it more body it would quickly fluff up and then collapse onto your face before you finished your pass.
This is the soap I used in our first Shave challenge on the Sunday call... I had a crappy shave that day for sure! Keep experimenting!
I think the Crabtree and Evelyn Sienna soap I sent you was the 1998-2005 version which should lather really well. Have fun
The lather I got this morning was just a bit better. And it did fade out before I finished. It seems like it's a dry-loader (somewhere @NurseDave is snickering himself to death). It's definitely a work in progress. I'll post any improvements I get.
Ok.....day 3 impressions. I used almost no water on the brush (Paladin Synth) and zero water on the puck. It still foamed up like I'd dumped Lake Mead on it. I worked the lather a bit and got a half decent foam. But as soon as I applied it to my face it nearly evaporates before my eyes. Very peculiar. @Luecke3262 you may be right....this is one crappy soap. I'm going to try adding some Proraso cream to it to see if that helps. It's certainly a unique challenge.
Yes! I HATE to say this, but I'm almost glad that Crabtree and Evelyn went out of business so that this horrid soap was no longer available to new wet shavers. I'm sure it dissuaded and upset a vast quantity of men who picked it up or were gifted this soap. From my remembrance, the people who were into superlathering with Proraso white or other inert scented creams really enjoyed the produced product which at the time were well scented and lathered well(95% because of the cream itself). I wonder what your thoughts will be on the other C&E soap I sent you, it is around 20+ years old and should be of the older base. I'd love to know your thoughts by comparison.
It is upsetting to see that these large corporations who buy up these brands try to save money by changing up the soap formulations. It's almost like they do no product testing before releasing such atrocities. This is a story that is as old as time. Buy up a failing old brand, cheapen up all the products and sell them out to loyal customers to make a huge profit, then sell off all pieces of the old company milking out the last bits of it for years to gobble up the tax incentives.... Rinse and repeat... Rinse and repeat...
Your lathering experience is exactly in line with my own and I would have been VERY surprised if you had managed to pull something akin to MdC or a @CBLindsay soap. Forge forth Lather King, I look forward to your scholarly exploits!
I was ready to try again this morning....but I punted and went with a CBL soap (The best quality!!). I know that doesn't help our experiment but I wasn't feeling like I wanted to go that route.....simple and easy felt better. I'll have it tomorrow.
I'm not sure what makes this soap so lightweight. It must be something in the formulation. Perhaps @CBLindsay has some insight into why this soap just doesn't hold up the way other formulas do. I can only imagine its a cheaper base.
Generally speaking, provided the soap formulation is truly capable of achieving a "shaving lather", a soaps failure to lather is a result of too little product and/or too much water. I was able to find a listing on Amazon that showed the product box including a view of the back of the box. The listing had two distinctly different versions of the back of the box shown and other than the ingredients being different on each version the wording was exactly the same. One version had an ingredient list that read more like a bath bar than a shaving soap, the other was more in line with what I would expect to see in a shaving soap. The main reason I say this is that it appears (again, based on the ingredient list shown on amazon) that they used ONLY Sodium Hydroxide to turn the fats into soap in one version and used a combination of sodium hydroxide and potassium hydroxide in the other version. Sodium Hydroxide usually makes a harder soap and one that is less easily dissolved into water, making it difficult to load enough product onto a brush so it can be lathered...but great as a long lasting bath bar. Potassium Hydroxide makes a soap that is softer and much easier to dissolve into water, making it easier to load plenty of product into the bristles of a brush. Using JUST Potassium hydroxide usually results in a softer soap (or croap) than using a mix of both sodium and potassium hydroxide.
If the soap you have has an ingredient list that has only sodium hydroxide (sodium palmate, sodium palm kernalate, sodium cocoate etc) and no potassium hydroxide (potassium palmate, potassium cocoate etc) I would expect it to be difficult to lather. But if/when a lather is achieved it should be plenty creamy not overly bubbly. I would be tempted to suggest blooming the soap WELL with enough warm water to leave a slight puddle and loading with a damp brush until some version of "protolather" forms on the puck. Depending on how difficult it is to lather I might even suggest loading as described then adding a few drops of water to the surface again and loading again. This should ensure enough product is loading into the brush. Then add water sparingly until a good lather is achieved. Alternatively, smearing some unscented shaving cream onto the surface of the puck might help it to load better and make it less sensitive to how much water you are using.
Wow....that's some great info. Unfortunately, the puck that @Luecke3262 sent me was not in a box so I have no idea what the ingredients are. Matt, Do you know? But I can tell you that I bloomed that puck for well over 6 hours...in fact it was pretty close to 8 hours. That made it lather up much as you described a bath bar would.....very frothy and airy. I then left the puck out on the counter the entire next day and tried to lather it with as little water as possible. While that made a slight improvement, the end results were about the same. An airy lather that dissapated as quickly as you put it on your face. It sounds like the formula was changed to something akin to a bath bar and not a shave soap. But it is a hard puck....so I'm not sure what's going on with it.
I'm going to keep experimenting.
Thanks for your expert info, Chris.
@CBLindsay Sorry guys I don't have the box anymore, but I remember a ton of other folks having the same issues with the soap when Nomad was rebranded as Moroccan Myrrh. I'll have to look and see if I have a box of the lime somewhere at the house. It was bought at the same time and should have the same ingredients. I remember loading that soap for 2-3 minutes at a time and thinking I finally had enough product loaded, but just as soon as any water was added it blew up into an airy foam. @heysi you should try loading for 3+ minutes to see what happens!
This one had a general consensus as an excellent long-lasting bath soap.
I'll add that to the list of different attempts I have planned for this soap. I loaded for a few seconds and for only an instant but got the same result both times. I'm gonna figure it out.....It may take the whole puck.....but it will not defeat me.you should try loading for 3+ minutes to see what happens!
Have you tried putting a layer of glycerin based soap (most of the “pre-shave” soaps) on your face before building the lather on your face? Might help to stabilize the lather and keep it from dissipating so quickly.
If you have success here, maybe we should buy a puck of GF Trumper’s Eucris hard soap, cut it up and send out samples for people to experiment on
If you have success here, maybe we should buy a puck of GF Trumper’s Eucris hard soap, cut it up and send out samples for people to experiment on
Interesting. I will investigate.
@heysi the sad thing is there should be no need to add anything/superlather a premium shaving soap. Granted this company was in the last throws of death before its eventual liquidation when this puck was purchased.Have you tried putting a layer of glycerin based soap (most of the “pre-shave” soaps) on your face before building the lather on your face? Might help to stabilize the lather and keep it from dissipating so quickly.
If you have success here, maybe we should buy a puck of GF Trumper’s Eucris hard soap, cut it up and send out samples for people to experiment on
I’ve been watching this thread with interest, although Matt is correct that in the final days of Crabtree and Evelyn, their soaps went to crap and were not even a reflection of their former glory, however, try not blooming with soap, load the soap heavily with almost a completely dry brush, just lightly lightly wet. Load heavy until it gets almost to a wallpaper paste, consistency, then apply to your face and add 1 to 2 drops of water to the brush until you get the consistency that you want see if that works
This is the method I was going to try this weekend (the puck is drying as we speak). The dry-load I attempted on day 3 was an improvement over the wet-load (and with that, @NurseDave falls over laughing) on day 1. I then decided to let that sucker dry out completely, so I haven't used it since tuesday. I have several ideas on how to experiment with this puck. It's a tough nut to crack....but I'm not giving up just yet. Thanks for the advice.
I remember that soap simply evaporating on your face.
It continues to disappoint.