Thread: Vintage Williams Menthol shave

Just did a shave with this Williams soap http://straightrazorpalace.com/show-tell/122182-vintage-williams-menthol.html .

I did not soak the puck and used a synthetic brush to face lather with and shaved with a Merkur slant DE.

The puck was fairly dry after all these years so I gave the brush a quick shake over the puck and started loading. I repeated that several times because of the pucks dryness. It lathered up well but there was no hint of scent or the menthol. Pretty much expected because of the age of the puck. Gave a nice smooth shave, far better than the current version of Williams. Still slicker and creamier than the modern version.

That is it for my experimenting with vintage Williams soaps. From the 3 examples I have tried it must have been a good soap in it's day and still is considering how aged the examples I tried were. Makes me wonder how/why they seemed to have castrated the modern stuff. There is no way you can convince me that the vintage formula is the same as the modern one from the performance difference I see between the two.

Bob