The lost art of scraping your face with sharp bits of metal, and how to make it suck less.
Those of you that know me in real life know that, at any point in time, my facial hair is somewhere between “five o’clock shadow” and “hobo”. It’s not that I enjoy looking that way, it’s the simple fact that if I shave more often than about once a week, my face and neck become excruciatingly painful, and an angry red sea of ingrown hairs adorn the underside of my neck. Given a choice, I simply wait a week and shave then.
Having heard the same not-funny jokes too many times, I resolved to find a way to improve my shaving experience. Enter my other hobby, perfuming, and the group of enablers I keep company with, Basenotes. I posted a thread to the effect of what I have just written, and received several recommendations, many of them as cheap as one could ask for.
I bought nearly everything possible that they recommended, minus a new razor. I’ve got a few unused heads for my Gillette Fusion and I will be using them up, thank you very much. All the time in the world to buy a safety razor after these are gone. So I find myself with shaving cream in a tube not unlike a toothpaste tube, a boar-bristle brush, and some sort of miracle product that allows me to get an entire shave’s worth of lubrication out of 3 to 5 drops. Right.
Before I did battle with my face, I learned. Namely, I learned how to shave. Sounds a little backwards, but one of the members of the shaving website Badger and Blade was kind enough to make a lot, and I mean a lot, of YouTube videos covering nearly everything you’d want to know about shaving. The first video in a three-part series that I watched … (More) “The lost art of scraping your face with sharp bits of metal, and how to make it suck less.”