Lathering Without a Brush

On Mondays I have a rather long day, ending with an university class that I teach in the early evening. So I like to get a close shave on Monday mornings so I have little shadow in my class.

Today I decided to take my close Monday shave without a shaving brush. I simply wet and washed my face, rinsed off the bath soap, then rubbed on shave soap and "lathered" with wet hands. The word lathered is in quotation marks because, when I don't use a brush to make shaving lather, the so-called lather is more like a creamy film, and not really much like lather at all.

However, it is wet, and it is slick. Using my 17th-use Bluebird blade in my c.1948 Gillette Tech razor, I took a with-grain pass. That pass consisted of my usual oblique strokes in an anti-raking pattern. I did not rinse the soap off my razor, and merely kept shaving on throughout the pass.

For the second pass, which was a combination of across and against grain, I just re-wetted my face using the soap still present.

Then I finished by rinsing with cool tap water, applying more soap from my soap stick to my now-smooth face, "lathering" that soap with wet hands, and doing a final clean-up pass against grain.

The result was a close shave with three tiny pin-point weepers. The outcome wasn't especially close, however, and was about the same as those days when I skip the cross-grain pass and limit the shave to just with grain and against grain. The benefit of those days is typically fewer wounds.

In all not a bad shave despite the absence of thick lather. Tomorrow I may again forego the brush and take a standard shave or my more common two-pass shave.

Happy shaving!