Thread: Foundation Soaps

Originally Posted by Steve56

These kinds of posts - top 10, 5, 3, the only one - appear very often across the forums and if you look at the replies collectively, you will see all soaps and creams. I believe there's a reason why, it's because people have different experience levels and also have 'artificial' boundaries that they don't tell you in their replies.

For example, a number of people have said they'd never pay more than $15 for a soap, so when they tell you their top 3, whatever, they're telling you their top 3 under $15, but they don't post that bit of relevant information. Others are just beginning to experiment and if you creep your way up the soap ladder, a particular answer might include only tier 2 soaps because they have not tried a tier 1 soap yet. Others may give a technically good answer for a DE/SE but maybe not as technically good for a straight (and visa versa) and you don't know what they shave with. Not to mention beard and skin types.

I shave with a straight razor and have experience across the price spectrum. My three favorite soaps and creams are:

Valobra tallow/AoS/Czech and Speake
Martin de Candre
Savonnerie du Moulin

Castle Forbes
ABC
D. R. Harris

ABC is in my list despite it's price because my skin likes it, versus other creams. ABC is very concentrated so if you 'dole it out' you'll be surprised how long it will last. Everything else is at least a moderate buy in terms of price per shave. But if my skin did not love it, it would not be in my list because of the price.

There are no North American artisans in my list because even though a very few perform as well, they're typically softer and they go fast as has been mentioned above. It would be easy to spend much more in a year on artisan soaps than ABC with its $60-80 price tag. Most of the artisan scents also seem strange to me though some are quite pleasant, but you'd never mistake any of them them for a Floris or Penhaligon's scent.

SNM is not there either, not because it's not good, but because I am not a menthol/eucalyptus person. This bit of information does make a difference when someone else reads the reply!

Cheers, Steve

I pretty much agree with everything you've said here and it's echo's my experience.

Your list wouldn't be much different than mine in that the artisan soaps are fun, but IMO, in the end, very, very few hold up against the old school soaps you mention in both quality and longevity, which I thought was an excellent point.

The artisan soaps can be fun to play with, but I find the vast majority of them end up getting used once, twice, occasionally three times and then get forgotten about...

Great post....

Martin de Candre, any scent, is pretty much all that I would need.
It's what I use as a baseline to judge all other soaps.

Pete <:-}