Thread: Help With Hard Soap Lather

It's almost certainly because you aren't loading enough soap. I used to have this exact problem until I learned that I needed more soap. Maybe because I have hard water or something, I don't know.

Anyway, try this out, it worked for me.

-Before you get in the shower, put your brush in hot water, and put a teaspoon or two of hot water on top of your soap puck and let it sit.
-When you get out of the shower, don't dry your face, leave it wet.
-Pour the water out of the bowl you soaked your brush in, squeeze the bristles dry, and give the brush 3-4 shakes. You want the brush pretty dry at this point.
-Pour the extra water off the top of your soap.
-Fill up your bowl again with hot water, to the brim, and leave it off to the side.
-Hold the brush in your dominant hand and the soap in the other
-Go to town loading the brush. Count in your head, AT LEAST 30 seconds. For the first couple times you want to load WAY more than you think you should. As you get the hang of it you can cut back to the appropriate amount, but for now, you'd rather have more than less.
-Twirl, swirl, plunge, twist, paint, do anything you can think of to aggressively load as much soap as humanly possible onto your brush. If you start to see a very very dense soapy paste starting to form in the bowl and on the brush, you shook out just enough water. If the brush is having a very hard time picking up soap, you shook out too much water. If you are starting to form what looks like the proper density lather, you didn't shake out enough water.
-When you think you've loaded enoguh soap, go at it another 10 seconds and load even more soap. Seriously, your first couple times you want to load just an asinine amount of soap. Something you would do to get your friends to laugh at you, lol.
-When your soap is loaded, put the brush down, and use your finger to grab all the proto-lather left on/in/around the bowl and smear it on your face.
-Begin to face lather with the brush, it will go on very thick at this point, but no worries.
-Once your face is covered in thick lather, dip the bristles of your brush into the bowl full of water. Not too much, maybe 1/8" deep. Give a very gentle shake so as not to have the water literally dripping off, but you also don't want to lose too much of it, and begin lathering again.
-Keep dipping your brush 1/8" and going back to the face until you have a nice lathering going. You will see that your brush will go from being very dense to the point that the lather in it allows the brush to hold it's shape (that is if you paint with it in one direction, the bristles will stay that way) to where it is beginning to be bloomed looking again.
-Your lather will be ready when it starts to get very slick. It will feel very slick as the brush passes over it.
-You're good to go! Shave away.
-Each pass when you need more lather, you may need to dip the bristles 1/16" just to refresh the lather.

Anyway, I had alot of trouble making lather from soap when I started, and I was having the same results you were, and this process is what I use now to consistently get good lather. As I said, with the above method, you will be loading more soap than you need for the first couple times. As you get the hang of it, you can scale back the amount of soap until you find "just the right amount" for what you need.

Above is a really good post on face lathering, which is my method. I don't like lathering in a bowl or mug because it just seems like a waste or time. Face lathering, to me, seems easier and quicker than all that other stuff with mugs and bowls. Now I only use a mug for soaking my brush while I am in the shower.