Thread: BrickBag

Hello everyone at SRP,

tl;dr: I'm BrickBag, a 23 year old newbie to straightrazor shaving.

A little bit about me
As said before, I'm 23 year old and currently a final-year student of informatics(specialising in networks and computer security) working on his bachelor thesis. I live near the lovely city of Utrecht in the middle of The Netherlands.

Getting into straight-razing
I started growing whiskers at about 14 and have shaved my face using several kinds of razors. The first was an electrical Philips(hey, i'm Dutch) razor which I used for 2 years(1 shave a week), by that time a friend of mine told me that he was shaving using a safety razor and that it was much better than electrical razors.

So I bought myself a Gillette Mach 3(which was new at that time) and a can of shaving cream and was quite content with the result. I used the Mach 3 and later the Gillette Fusion(with 5 blades) but I wasn't happy with the results after the shave: my skin became very red(especially in my neck), sensitive and the smoothness didn't last. So I bought myself a 1 bladed disposable Wilkinson razor about 6 months ago, which made shaving a little better.

About 2 months ago my girlfriend bought me a shaving soap from "De Vergulde Hand" and a boar brush, I had the best shave of my life using those tools! I then started to wonder "How would old-school shaving be?". I mean, if shaving with a simple disposable blade and shaving soap if so much better, how will straight razor shaving be?

So I went to my barber and bought a simple Filarmonica razor which uses razorblades for about 15 bucks(I didn't want to spend a lot of money, since I didn't know I was going to like it) and surfed the web to check for instructions and got to the SRP wiki. Using those instructions I got a really nice shave(and some nicks).

And going on...
I now want to get myself a real razor, but my internship doesn't really pay generously, so I'm gonna restore a razor(A J.A. Hellberg, Sweden 26) my girlfriend gave me last week(I'll open a separate thread on it after I finished this one), which will be a nice weekend project for the coming time.

So again: Hi!

Update: Thread on my restoration here