Thread: Techniques for stopping full hollows from skipping?

Originally Posted by MattCB

It sounds like you are putting a lot of effort into your prep, and I applaud you for that, but I can't help but think that a dedicated shaving soap used to "soak" while stropping and to re-apply when shaving would yield significantly better results. The fact that is had stearic acid just means that it is in fact a soap. In fact, it is one of two acids that is used to saponify fats into soap. Hope this is at least a little helpful, best of luck and let us know how things works out.

Edit: Seems I was not quite correct on the stearic acid. Here is a link to a pgae with a short write up. (Still stand by getting some quality shave soap though)

Stearic Acid

"Stearic Acid will offer many of the same characteristics as palmitic acid. Once again, you'll gain hardness to your bar and add a creamy/stable lather."

"Palmitic Acid will add hardness to your bar and a creamy/stable lather. Careful though... too much can be over drying!"

Still might be worth a shot to lather up with my MWF (the only soap worth a damn, IMO) before stropping. I tried this long ago with other soaps but they dried out too quickly.

Haven't been using Wedges,mainly because Wedge honing and stropping is the pits. For 'comps' I would offer the Feather Str8.
Find the Feather shaves fantastic. As they have 'no' grind just an straight up and down like a wedge, I'd have to say its the Sharpness that makes the difference not the grind type???

Got a little too busy last week to update this, so here goes. I shaved on Wednesday with a three-day growth (I always shave on Sundays). I would say the skipping was better, but not enough to make the extra 45 mins to shave before work worth it. I'll keep shaving once a week I guess.

I changed my prep yesterday to only use MWF while stropping. It seemed to be a better shave. Fantastically smooth. I might stick with that.

Also, as I mentioned in my first post, the real test of any shave for me is ingrown hairs. I'm happy to report that with my new Henckels 7/8 full hollow I had no ingrown hairs at all this week. I'm a happy shaver

Originally Posted by supersco

Got a little too busy last week to update this, so here goes. I shaved on Wednesday with a three-day growth (I always shave on Sundays). I would say the skipping was better, but not enough to make the extra 45 mins to shave before work worth it. I'll keep shaving once a week I guess.

I changed my prep yesterday to only use MWF while stropping. It seemed to be a better shave. Fantastically smooth. I might stick with that.

Also, as I mentioned in my first post, the real test of any shave for me is ingrown hairs. I'm happy to report that with my new Henckels 7/8 full hollow I had no ingrown hairs at all this week. I'm a happy shaver

For what's it's worth, give this a try.

I used to do a lot of pre-shave stuff, I called it my, "shave parade", hot shower, hot towels, pre-shave etc, etc....

Then I read here about the cold shave.

Splash cold water on face, load the brush, thoroughly lather the face, shave like normal. I always like the alum block, so I'd use that, then AS.

All irritation was gone, no more irritated red areas around my lower right neck area, and a good DFS shave after two passes.

Once in awhile, it's a nice treat to throw a shave parade, but my stand-by is a cold shave, and I've never looked back. YMMV, but it's worth a try!

Cheers!

scalding hot water applied to your face is likely your problem regarding in-grown hairs. Tepid water will do well enough to open pores and hydrate the beard. Hot water will tend to dry your skin tremendously, mess with the balance of sebum production in the follicle and probably cause all sorts of irritation at a sub-dermal level. Not to mention, such hot water will soften your skin as well, so much so that you may be exfoliating way too drastically.

Please try your routine sans scalding hot water and report back. I'm curious now and would like to know if this helps.