Thread: Williams Shaving Soap 40 years Later

Originally Posted by ZeroCool

Cali,

I agree, for some of us it just doesn't come easy.

I've got more soaps and creams to last me years but the challenge of the Williams is what intrigues me.

There's so many people saying it works and they love it. Now I know it's not going to replace any of my other soaps but I determined to make it work

The challenge intrigued me until I bought a vintage puck of Williams on ebay that worked as well as Tabac or any other premium soap I ever used, and worked repeatedly, and without effort.

I grated a puck of modern Williams in a cheese grater and the first shave was magnificent. Afterward I couldn't coax a good, lasting lather using several different techniques suggested here an elsewhere. That led me to believe that, by grating, all the "goodies" the puck was enriched with were released the first time I mixed up that lather, and used up during that first shave. Then the rest of the soap was depleted.

My conclusion was that the Williams of yesteryear had enough goodies to last the whole puck through. My grating experiment told me that the makers of this soap have drastically reduced the amount of ingredients that made it the superior product it was.

It seems to me that those who have learned to make modern Williams work have, maybe without realizing it, figured out a way to conserve resources and coax enough out of each shave to make the limited amount of goodies last.

That's when I lost interest. I figured I wasn't learning to do anything but accommodate a cheapening of the formula.

I wanted to like Williams because it is an American product dating back to 1840 and really desired to somehow identify and relate my retro-shaving experience to something like that. I would pay $5 or more a puck and become a regular customer if I could have the vintage stuff.

Hopefully this doesn't make me a Williams basher. I'm still interested in a vintage version, but don't want to rely on ebay to find pucks made many years ago. Perhaps they could introduce a "Luxury" version with essentially the Glastonbury formula and sell it for $5-$7.50 a puck. But by doing so they would be admitting that they did change it, and they steadfastly maintain that it hasn't changed.

100+ year-old ads like this make me wish I could have what this guy used: