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| Thinking of the 7-o'clock black blade.... |
This particular blade I'd like to sum up in a word... yuk. In three words... sharp but irritating.
This morning after my third shave, which was a two-pass shave with some extra fussing, it was again close but irritated and leaving behind several weepers. My choice of shaving implements were the Merkur 15C open comb for the first, with-grain pass, and then the now-familiar Weishi 9306-F for the second, against-grain pass and the additional clean-up strokes.
This blade is SO NOT comfortable that after today's shave, I palm stropped with a dry palm to try to increase the abrasion and hopefully smooth out the blade edge. Then I stropped again with an oiled palm to help seal the steel from oxygen.
Maybe the comfort of the blade will be improved tomorrow from all the stropping. This is such a disappointment after 24 fine shaves with the Personna red label.
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On another note, do you use buffing strokes during your shave? For a little extra whisker whisking, you might try making those buffing strokes with the razor edge not quite perpendicular to the buffing-stroke direction. In other words, try oblique-buffing strokes.When I use buffing strokes, I do not lift the razor; I keep it in contact with my skin for both the cutting and return strokes. I have found no drawbacks to this, and the advantage may be that the return stroke brings some moisture and lather back over the just-shaved area to help lubricate the next cutting stroke.
Hope your shave this morning was better than mine. Happy shaving!
I do it, but never happily... so I started referring to all steeply pitched strokes as buffing, while minimizing the repeats as much as I can.
ReplyDeleteSounds like black is an impression of Feather. Would they use each other's packaging as a code like that? Green, like Astra? What would yellow be?