Hi, I'm Fred. I've been investigating SR shaving for a while now and mentioned the idea of a straight shave to my wife before Father's Day and sure enough I ended up with a gift card to Art Of Shaving. She's pretty awesome. So in anticipation to going in for the Royal Shave I spent a lot of time searching all corners of the interweb for all I could find about SR, that included finding this forum. Well, the Royal Shave was pretty amazing, I left there with a smooth face and very relaxed. What I didn't leave with was any better knowledge of straight razor shaving. I guess I had the expectation that the master barber would really be explaining things as he went, especially since I told him right off that this was a first. I wasn't expecting a full on Queer Eye For The Straight Guy thing but some explanation of why he's rubbing oil on my face or painting mud. And he used a fusion or something to clean up, I expected the shavette instead of a real straight razor, but not the fusion multi-blade. Like I said, the shave was a great, relaxing, man spa kind of thing, but not what I was hoping for in getting a real man shave.

So, now I'm on a quest. I'm ready to jump in the water and give this a try. I'm thinking about ordering the Straight Razor Starter Set from Classic Edge. I'm sure I might find individual pieces less expensive but $180 is less than a Corvette if this is just some kind of mid-life crisis move. Does anyone a have thoughts about this set? I've read good things here on the forum about Phil.