Originally Posted by
Alraz
Ok, when does a sponge absorb more water: dry or wet?
Answer: dry. This is why it is easier to load a brush with a soap that is not drenched in water. You want the brush moist but not drenched in water. Also, for milled soaps that are typically harder, adding a bit of water to the soap helps. This is not necessary but it helps some people. This way, you make the soap softer and therefore, easier to be picked up by the brush. The other way around: dry soap and drenched brush, could be problematic, although not always.
After that, building lather lather should be the same for soaps or creams. You should progressively add water until you reach a point where no more lather can be built regardless of how much swirling you do, this is the peak of the soap. The "peak" is an intrinsic property of each soap/cream. Some soaps/creams are very robust (very insensitive to how much water you add, sort of; glycerin based soaps can be like that), other are a bit more "finicky" with the amount of water that they take and they may require a bit of experimentation. Usually soaps/creams that are very robust are not the best performers because the robustness is obtained at the expense of the performance (this is in general).
Finally, when you reach the peak of the soap, the lather has to be hydrated. PLEASE! do not add water like a madman here ;-), a couple of drops is usually sufficient. If you are lathering on a bowl, you can see big air bubbles mixed in with your lather when you reach this point.
Properly hydrated lather helps in several ways: 1) it ensures that the concentration of chemicals in the soap/cream is correct; drier lathers can irritate your skin because of the chemicals in the soap/cream are at a higher than optimal concentration; 2) it provides a slight excess of water, which contributes to soften your whiskers; and 3) very related to 2, has the optimal glide for the soap, which prevent your razor from skipping and nicking yourself. So, if you experience any of the above problems, you may want to work on your lathering technique. Please note that the cushion of the lather, which is the other important aspect of the lather during a shave, is less sensitive to whether the lather is hydrated or not. If you go overboard in the hydration step, you see beautiful lather that vanishes into thin air when you apply it to the face, this is very common.
I focused on aspects directly related to shaving but lather from good soap/cream should go beyond that as there is a lot more to a shave than merely removing hair.
Al raz.