Quote Originally Posted by BrentonC View Post
[in response to the question what would make it... more scientific, or whatever it was]

Alternate shaving protocols each day. Probably goes without saying.

A second person to blindly rate your two razors for sharpness to confirm your findings.

Some objective means of establishing lather lubricity, vicosity, foamicity etc-icity.

Of course, it'd be even better if you were blind to the prep technique, but drugging you and having someone else do it is impractical.
Those are good points. For the first one, I decided to perform each prep. treatment for 6 consecutive days followed by a rest day to minimise any residual effects on my skin from the other prep method - you know, just in case I get some burn or whatever, it would not leach over into the other beard prep treatment - and also to try to assess medium-term effects of the prep routines. But I do see the point of a daily alternation.

The problem with experiments like this is that there is a very constrained population to infer about (me, my beard, my soap, my strop, my brush, my selected razors etc). So your other points, while valid, are unnecessary embellishments in the present case. If this experiment was being replicated over many shavers, in an attempt to expand the inferential sphere, then consistency of all these things would be vital.

But it is just me. And as I have said, my shaving routine is at a point where any variability in the (non-treatment related) ingredients to the shave process (lather, stropping etc) will at least be consistent across treatments, if not minimal compared to the variability due to the treatments. This is my biggest concern here in fact - that any signal might be swamped by noise - but if my edges last long enough, the old sample size thingy will kick in and hopefully I might get some kind of result I can trust.

But in the end, I am doing it for the fun. If it doesn't work, or the results are inconclusive, at least I had fun doing it. And those who come after me can treat what I have done as a pilot and improve from there.

James.