Weekly Shave Review: Astra SP, Dried Soapy Brushes, and the Aqua Velva Man

It's been an eventful week. Most notably, I took an inventory of my DE razors, thinking that perhaps I could come up with a list to sell and some to simply pitch in the trash can.

After doing this inventory, I did actually trash the Wilkinson Sword Classic and a Rimei that arrived damaged from the seller and on which I had scratched its chrome plating in trying to repair it. I couldn't bring myself to jettison the three trash-or-treasure razors that I'd modified to be mild shavers of varied degree but which I'll probably never use. I couldn't even throw away the one-piece, all-aluminum, ultra-light Weishi 2003-m, on which I had to use jeweler's pliers to metal smith the doors so that the blade edges would lie straight. In so doing, I had marred the surface of the top cap so that it's cosmetically imperfect; as a result it's unsalable, and I'll probably never shave with this razor anyway because it isn't as mild as its more famous brass-substrate cousins, the Weishi 9306, the MicroTouch One, the Dorco, and the Van Der Hagen.

The razor-inventory process did cure me of razor acquisition disorder, however. When I took them out of the closet shoe box and surveyed them all at one time, I realized how over the months this has gotten completely out of hand, and I have too many razors. I was mortified at the silly waste of excess DE razors.

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The soapy-brush experiment has gone well. Using a synthetic-bristled brush, I believe there's no issue at all with not rinsing the brush after use and simply letting the lather dry in place for the next shave. In the future, when I get back to using my boar brush, I'll continue the experiment and report out the results.

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The week's shaves with the Astra Superior Platinum blade in my Techs were fine as in good enough, adequate. They were low irritation shaves and fairly close despite my generally using only two passes: with grain and against. Yet my three-pass shave (with, across, and against grain) on Friday (yesterday) was not quite baby smooth on my cheeks, and opened a few tiny weepers. This morning I'm going to again take three passes, but this time making the final two both against the grain.

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Also, my wife has liked the slight lingering scent of the Aqua Velva Ice Blue usage as part of my shaving-lather preparation and with my post-shave moisturizing. In fact and much to my surprise, she encouraged me to try some Aqua Velva musk after shave, which I had privately rejected prior to discussing it with her. So with her encouragement, I'll probably get some of that today and try it out tomorrow.

Happy shaving!