Hi Everyone, I apologize for the long post.

So I thought I might post my recent excursions with the straight. I was hoping to have great news about how I was a natural, how the engineering mindset is perfect for this task, how my ambidextural skills aided in technique, etc. But I can't.

The first shave went pretty badly. I had saved some beard for 2.5 days, thinking it might be good to have something to 'work with'.

I did hot towels and tried my starter kit from AOS with a VDH boar brush. I used the towel, then oil, then towel, then warm lather, then tried to shave. It was a good start, relaxing and nice. Well, I'd never used oil and had imagined it would make this gliding layer under the soap. Instead, it made a protective layer over each hair and made my skin tacky. The blade never did 'glide' across my face. By the time I had made a few strokes (if they could be called that) the lather had dried into a layer of white dust. Between these two issues the blade magically removed more skin then hair! The dry soap kind of burnt my skin and that sucked bad. I added water and tooled around for like an hour, cleaned everything up and had to baby my skin for the next 24 hours...