Thread: ATG Necessity?

For some reason it never dawned on me to use a DE to clean up. I guess maybe it felt like cheating on my straight, or forcing it into an unwanted manage toi.

The other night I was thinking about a TV show that used to be on, called 'Queer Eye for the Straight Guy', anyone used to watch that? I remember they (the queer guys, who would gleefully bombard the straight guy with their queer fashion and grooming advice) used to shriek at the monitor as they saw their 'charge' forget their oft repeated advice to NEVER go ATG. But of course that wasn't with a straight...

I go ATG only along the jawline. I get a perfectly good shave from just a WTG with all but one of my razors (one needs a bit more work), but a perfectly good shave is relative. If I don't want to FEEL ANY whiskers at ALL, then three full passes is needed, but really, there's no need for me to be that smooth all the time. I don't think I'd ever go ATG on the chin. When I shaved my goatee a while ago (just to see what it was like, it's grown back now) I found ATG on the chin almost impossible, and did just WTG and XTG on that area.

I go slightly XTG (as a consequence of how I shave) but mostly WTG and I don't feel like my shave is really lacking anywhere. I could pull on the skin and feel a little bit of hair (that I wouldn't if I stretched it tight and really worked at it ATG), but otherwise if I feel my face after a shave, I don't feel anything except perhaps just at my neck below the jawline which is a big time razorburn area for me. I usually take it light there but still get it pretty good, just WTG.

Someone made a comment here not too long ago about a barber saying that the thing that most people do wrong is try to get too close. If you have extremely sensitive skin (I do) then you can get a really really good shave with two WTG passes and a razor that is properly sharp (if it's not properly sharp, then it's not going to work that well).

If you want to play some saturday and take a 20 minute shave, then you can fiddle with the rest of the stuff, I guess. My morning shave is two passes in four minutes (which includes getting out and putting away the soap, face lathering only). I don't blade buff in the morning, and I don't even pull the skin that tight, it's not necessary if the razor is really sharp. Just start the razor at the sideburn and run it all the way down to the middle of my neck. Move over an inch and a half, pull one long stroke again. And do the same thing on the second pass.

When I first started shaving, i'm pretty sure my razors were a step short of the sharpness needed to do that and get a good shave. I'm much more pleased with that process now for a daily shave than all of the fiddling to try to get everything perfect and go over some spots more than twice. It's a very pleasant experience, and it's still a better shave with less irritation than I ever got with cartridge razors.