Today was the final shave with my first Derby Extra blade; today it was in the 37C slant razor. I did a three-pass shave, and for a blade with about a week's worth of shaves on it, I got a surprisingly close, comfortable shave. Afterwards, the blade went into the recycling bank (I hope you are recycling your blades -- and everything else possible), and I focused my attention on considering the characteristics of shave-soap #8, which was tested for the first time today.
Soap #8 took some key ingredients to rather extreme proportions. It was interesting that although the resulting lather didn't seem as slick as my best formulation to date (which was SS#6), despite using a well-used blade in the slant razor and making three passes this morning, any resulting dryness and irritation was still very minimal. No after-shave balms or lotions were necessary; just rinses of cool water bracketing the usual post-shave alum-block rub. My cheeks are baby-bottom smooth, and look and feel great.
So after pondering all this and noting my observations and conclusions in my lab book, I chose to make up two new test pucks of shave soap. SS#9, in a sense, is the fraternal twin to SS#8. They have the same general proportions of key ingredients except that the secondary of the several ingredients in the recipes differs. SS#10 is the child of SS#8 and SS#6 -- meaning that the ingredients are the same as the parent soaps, but the relative amounts are an interpolation, a intermediate mixture, of those two formulas.
It's a test of patience when I've mixed up more than one soap formula for test, because I really want to see how each shaves RIGHT AWAY.
The general plan is to test #10 tomorrow, #9 the day after, and figure it out from there.
Hope your shave this morning was a good one like mine.
Happy shaving!
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| Three shave-soap formulations involved in this morning's activity. SS#8 was used for the morning shave. From that experience, I made 5-gram test pucks of #9 and #10 for later trial and evaluation. |
So after pondering all this and noting my observations and conclusions in my lab book, I chose to make up two new test pucks of shave soap. SS#9, in a sense, is the fraternal twin to SS#8. They have the same general proportions of key ingredients except that the secondary of the several ingredients in the recipes differs. SS#10 is the child of SS#8 and SS#6 -- meaning that the ingredients are the same as the parent soaps, but the relative amounts are an interpolation, a intermediate mixture, of those two formulas.
It's a test of patience when I've mixed up more than one soap formula for test, because I really want to see how each shaves RIGHT AWAY.
The general plan is to test #10 tomorrow, #9 the day after, and figure it out from there.
Hope your shave this morning was a good one like mine.
Happy shaving!
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