In my search for a good shave I recently found that I have been going in the wrong direction. Fortunately I have a real barber that I just happend to ask for a hot shave a few times and decided I liked how it felt and have been doing some research on what it took to do it at home. All I can say is wow, there is a lot of info on SR shaving, lol. The number of member, posts etc on this forum astounds me, not to mention all the info outside of this site as well. With all that info I still seem lost and have a few questions.. some maybe from too much info being out there so I just cant find it.

Most, well all I have seen, of you all are clean shaven. I generally keep some sort of beard. Call me crazy, but sometime during college either my chin dissapeared or my neck got so big it swalloed it.. probably the later. So right now I have a very thin chin strap beard, but the beard increases.. decreases in volume but never dissapears. Right now it requires sculpting, and I am slightly concerned about this with a SR as I just don't see many resources out there for face scaping with a SR. Right now I use a Mach 5 on the big stuff, and then get the old Bic single blade to shape. I plan on replacing just the Mach with a SR until I really get the hang of it. It seems a square point might help with this, but I understand you are more prone to cutting yourself with this so it is probably not the best to start with. Any resources/opinions out there?

Also a few questions on stuff I need to get. I have seen some say they use a strop with two sides cloth and leather. Is this easier to start out with, or just personal preference? I was looking at one of the "house brand" strops from either SRD or Vintage Blades, but they look like just leather. Also is the wider strop easier to start with? There seems to be a lot of personal preference with any aspect of SR shaving, but being a newb I have no preference so I'm trying to go for the easier way to start with I suppose.

I was thinking of a Dovo for a first blade. They seem well constructed and easy to find. Again this would come from SRD or Vintage so that the blade was shave ready. I was looking in the $150 range, so Bismarck, Carpe Diem, Pearlex etc... Something 5/8, rounded edge, hollowed, in carbon.. Anyone have reccomendations or is this again a preference matter. Want to get a blade I could still use in the future but not mess up a very expensive blade.

I plan on easing in to it for a while. Right now I'm just going to get a brush and start working on prep, and then when I get the hang of that I'll start little by little using a SR.

Thank you guys! Looking forward to shaving adventure.