Thread: Hello from Helsinki, Finland

Good evening everyone, after my first personal straight razor shave (apart from one time in barber shop) I am ready to greet you.

I decided over a year ago to start straight razor shaving, but delayed the investment due to lack of time for practice and accumulated a lot of information about straight razor shaving, especially during last month.

Ordered a Dovo Best Shaving Kit from SRD (which I received last week) and watched hours and hours of videos and reading about straight razor and shaving prior my first shave today, which was in my scale successfull. Managed to remove all my beard (in 3hrs) with blood on my face (at least I learned to use the stypus pencil same time ). But the result was afterwards very clean, even though I could feel itching. Nevertheless my self-esteem was bumped after the session.

I also received Norton Waterstone 4k/8k, so this is a longer term investment for me. For you that hone your own straight razors, is finishing stone (above 8k) something you find useful when maintaining the edge?

After my life of using gillete disposable 2-edge, this was a huge leap and learnt something that I have never done before while shaving. I have to manage strech my skin more often and leather my face more often (especially if my first shave was 3hrs).

Some questions I have if this is right place to address them: for you that live in EU, where do you order your supplies for shaving (aftershave stuff, soaps or other straight razor accessories)? Im not big into paying custom taxes while ordering from US. SRD seems to be great place as they have everything, too bad they don't have EU store. Thanks to Don & Lynn for the products.

Welcome to SRP. I have been on the receiving end of UK Customs and the Royal Mail "cut" many times so I understand fully your desire to avoid these if possible. Here in the UK you might consider visiting Connaught Shaving and The Gentleman's Shop for your soap, creams, aftershaves etc, along with direct purchases from the likes of D.R. Harris and Geo. F. Trumper(avoid the Trumper's soaps though!). Neil Miller(a member here) of the Strop Shop and Steve Dempster of The Invisible Edge are both great guys to do business with for the hardware.
Hope this gives you a starting point.

Welcome! I hope you find it as enjoyable as I... "we," all do lol. It's great learning new skills and the pride of success is priceless lol.

Welcome .

BTW - I love Helsinki ! I think it would be well served with a Traditional Wet Shaving shop (hint, hint lol). Just make sure it's accessible via the "drinking" tram lol!

Thanks Optometrist for your tips, I'll have to take a look at those sources.

earcutter - thanks, glad to hear you liked Helsinki and drinking tram . Next time perhaps we can hop on together and you could share some experiences with wet shaving .

Hello iisakki and greetings from local Chicago. I purchased Naniwa 3000/8000 waterstone and so far it seems to be a good investment. Still trying to learn honing, though; I am not quite satisfied with the sharpness of my blade. Looking forward to get the strop I ordered, I hope it will further improve my shaving experience.

Welcome, good to have another scandinavian among us!

Welcome, enjoy your shaves!

Welcome. Seems you have a good start!

Tervetuloa, iisakki! It's good to have you here on SRP!

Congratulations on your first straight shave, well done. You will see that your shaves will get better and faster with time, eventually (pretty soon, in fact) you'll need far less than 3 hours.

If and when I order from Europe for delivery within the EU (which doesn't happen all that often as I live in Asia) then I order from Connaught or Executive Shaving in the UK or from Shaving.ie in Ireland. All of them have quite fast process and delivery times, expect when it comes to alcohol-based after shaves shipped out of the UK because of a new law they have passed earlier this year.

Greetings from a Luxembourgish Finn-at-Heart in Singapore (my better half is from Tampere and I have basically fallen in love with Finland along with falling in love with her ;-)

Thanks to all of you, it feels great to be part of this old tradition – I think that men have lost themselves regarding to beard shaving. One must be very curious and eager to exercise this kind of activity, as it is considered ancient and majority have “progressed” (backwards in my opinion) to Gillette and similar disposable shaving equipment.

Over a year ago before I had my first thoughts of starting straight razor shaving, I never considered it as an alternative to shave my beard. I think it would be fair to introduce this as an appropriate alternative to anyone who’s into shaving, because I would have certainly picked it over my disposables very long time ago. Well, better late than never .

Hermit – took me a while to connect local Chicago to Lahti, but good to see other finns around here! I’ve watched some Lynn’s honing videos, but my first honings are going to be later.

Smoothy – thank you! Yes, I think I can progress to shorter shaves, I just like to take the time to learn to handle straight razor and not rushing with it (patience is key). I’ll have to keep in mind those sites for future purchases of shaving products. Good to see you enjoying Finland and our offerings

Str8fencer – thank you, great to see also other Scandinavians here!

Smflee & sharptonn – Thank you, great to see Americans around here! I’ve been in US couple of times, and I really like the culture. People say what they think and respect individual freedom, which would be something unusual in my country (seems to be sideproduct of welfare-state…).