More on My Soap-Sample Admixture -- Wow!

This morning I had a 19th shave with a SuperMax Titanium blade (19th!!!) -- today in a 1965 Gillette Travel Tech razor head (the one that's nickel plated, with the cast-Zamak top cap), using my Phoenix Artisan Accoutrements (PAA) DOC handle. I got a very good shave!

This is my complete '65 Travel Tech kit. I only use the baseplate
and top cap for my shaves, choosing to use a standard-length handle
from PAA, which has a matching nickel-plating finish.

A significant contributor to this outcome was the shave soap. For the past couple of shaves I've been using my admixture of various shave-soap samples melted into a re-purposed (#5 plastic -- that's important because #5 plastic is heat tolerant and completely safe to use in a microwave oven) cream-cheese container. The drawback to this conglomeration of many soaps is that it stinks like dead flowers, since, after all, the whole reason for this jumble of soaps is that each one stank individually. I tried covering up the stink by adding some Aqua Velva Ice Blue aftershave to the open-to-the-air container. This helped a bit, but not at all entirely. The plan is to continue to leave the container in the open air and trust that eventually the stink will attenuate and become more tolerable.

This tub of soap may not look too fancy and, unfortunately, smells
like an old lady's bath powder -- that is, like dead flowers -- but it
whips up to the richest, slickest lather that I've ever seen! I'm hoping
that, left out in the open air long enought, the stink will diminish.

The really good news is that this soap admixture lathers beautifully. Not only is the soap lather aesthetically pleasing for its richness (I say aesthetically because I don't really believe that rich lather matters much; I believe the concept of lather cushion doesn't really manifest in physical experience), but more importantly, the slickness of this combination of many soaps is almost unbelievable! I've never used any individual shave soap, cream or butter that has the slickness of this soap admixture. Even after the shave, the slickness is remarkable to the extent that I had to rinse three times with water and then with a splash of witch hazel, and still the slickness remained. I finally had to wipe my wet face with a terry-cloth towel to remove the beautiful slickness of this soap of many samples.

The shave was almost as close as I can get; my skin irritation was minimal. The after effects were so mild that I didn't use my preferred PAA after-shave jelly with the Black Bot fragrance. Instead I used my Black Bot after-shave balm as a protecting moisturizer.

I use this balm when I primarily am seeking a moisturizing "sealer."
For soothing, I prefer the jelly with the Black Bot scent.

How do I get so many shaves from my blades? Is my beard merely peach fuzz? No, my beard is fairly tough, and has rather extreme grain in both angle to the skin and varied direction -- all of which can make baby-smooth outcomes merely a pipe dream. As for my blades, I carefully clean, dry, and palm strop them after each use. Why do I push the limits to extract as much use as possible before recycling the blade? This is because we have to stop having a disposable mentality and see the bigger picture. Our world is filling up with refuse -- much of which are pollutants to some degree. We are also wasting resources such as steel, which end up buried instead of being re-used for some positive purpose.

Happy shaving, but shave responsibly!