Tonight I decided to take my first stab (no pun intended) at a real straight razor shave.

The accessories were:

Taylor of Old Bond Street Pre-Shave Oil
Truefitt and Hill Ultimate Comfort Shaving Cream
Truefitt and Hill Ultimate Comfort Aftershave
Nickel plated badger brush
Dovo Buffalo Horn 5/8 full hollow



The razor is new and supposedly shave ready but I thought I would prep it a bit by stopping before a shave attempt. I did maybe 50 passes on the cloth side of the strop followed by 40 passes over the leather as demonstrated in a few instructional youtube videos I watched.

So showered up followed by a few minutes under hot towel, preshave oil and then lathered up the sides, which seem like the easiest spots to shave for a newbie like myself.

Well, it seems that the blade was nowhere near sharp enough. After about 6 minutes I had shaved both sides going with the grain, but lets just say it was rather unpleasant. No cuts or nicks, but I only managed to shave the areas by kind of chopping away at the hair. Any attempt to just let the blade glide across my face using the full width of the blade was met with very harsh tugging at the skin. I tried varying the angle of attack, from about 20 degrees to 40 degrees, but didnt make much difference. I ended up finishing the rest of my shave with a Mach3

I guess the razor simply isnt sharp enough from just stropping so I will wait for the Norton 4000/8000 honing block I ordered the other day.

A rough start to straight shaving but I'm not deterred.