Thread: Horrible lather

The culprit is not the brush or the soap.

When I first started straight shaving, I had issues with my lather as well. My two issues were:

1. I was not loading enough soap on my brush; and

2. I was not adding enough water.

Sometimes, a dry lather will have the exact same charecteristics as a lather with too much water.

I would experiment making lather over and over again until you get it right. Try adding too much water, try adding too little and watch the results. I would also make sure you are loading enough soap initially on the brush.

Keep at it and it will click.

Don't fret over your poor lather. It happens to all of us on occasion. Try a variety of lathering techniques until you find the one or two that best suit your tastes and needs.

If your lather is too thin, then try either loading more soap to the brush, or using a tad less water.

Sounds like your water ratio is pretty accurate (since the lather isn't running off or anything like that) but it's the amount of soap that's the culprit. Next time you load the brush from the puck squeeze the hair together to make a tight clump. Press the end of the clump (still squeezed) into the puck. Do two to three times as much swirling as you usually do to really load up that brush. The hair when released from your squeeze should be covered on the tip and stick together. From there, build lather in your scuttle as usual but you'll have to add more water. You should notice you get a lot more soap than you need doing this.

The squeezing technique is what i tend to do to load my brush. The idea of adding that much extra soap is rule that out as a problem/fix the problem and to give you an accurate sense of how much soap you need to make good lather. Good luck and keep us posted. Pictures are good too .

That Mantic video is a gem, I have learned so much from it, definitely a favorite of mine. Besides the obvious points made in regard of the soap to water ratio, I would like to add that if you increase both soap and water at the same time, you may end up in a similar situation. However as Fbones says, there is a critical amount of soap that you need to use that is determined by your particular conditions: soap, brush, water and technique. Start with enough but not too much soap and then start adding water in small quantities. It is often easier at first to keep the amount of soap constant and add water. It is not impossible to make good lather after you have added to much water but it is certainly harder. I would also like to point out that new brushes, particularly boar brushes, take some time to break in. Until then, lathering may not be as efficient as you would like. One thing that has helped me in the past to speed up the process of breaking the brush in is to put some soap and lather on the palm of my hand for sometime while I watch TV .

Al raz.

Please remember that it doesn't matter how thick the lather is. I know a lot of people will disagree with me on that statement. However, my belief is that a thin lather that proficiently coats your skin works just as well as a thick lather that coats your skin.

The most important part is the skin's surface coating of the soap/cream as that is what lubricates and protects your skin from the blade.