So I was wondering if anyone else has tried using these little things?
I just got mine from Mama Bear Soaps (great soaps, great service and great prices too!). And I decided to load it up yesterday with a new puck of MWF soap that I had around.
See, the thing that always gets me a little peeved about leaving my soap in the soap mug is that the puck of soap gets worn away by the water faster than I can use it. I try to pour all of the water out of the mug after I'm done lathering, but even so, the next day you can see how much of the soap is just getting dissolved and wasted with each use. So then I thought that I would just stick to soaps that come in their own, separate containers, but that gets to be kind of a waste too, because those soaps are always like three times as expensive as just the plain pucks of soap that you can buy. Of course, there's always the Mama Bear Soaps, which come in nice plastic containers and at a reasonable price, but other than that, there didn't seem to be any easy way to handle this. So that's what brought me to the point of trying out one of these soap lids.
As for actually using the lid, the process of grinding up the soap and then pressing it into the soap "lid" is not difficult, but it does take a fair amount of time -- at least a half hour for a novice like me. The problem seems to be that pressing the ground-up soap into the lid is not quite as easy as it looks, and actually you have to grind up a lot more soap than you'd think you'd need to fill up the lid.
Once the lid was full of soap, however, using the lid was a great experience. Swirling the wet brush around on the surface of the soap leaves a nice thick layer of soap on the bristles, which you can then transfer over to your mug or scuttle and add water and make whatever lather you need. No need to have your soap sitting in water and dissolving away to nothing while you shave.
Anyway, I'm not sure if anyone else even cares about soap waste the way that I do, but even if you don't, these little things are a nice solution to a problem you may not even be aware of!