Thread: time for soap or cream to absorb water?

I've sort of noticed this, especially with face-lathering. But in either case, my explanation to myself has been that it may have to do with either more water being on my face or my face having absorbed more water prior to the second pass than in starting out on the first pass. The cream or lather in a bowl doesn't change over time from what I can tell. Also, I tend to use a pre-shave cream on the first pass, which means that there is not as much water on my face on the first pass.

I notice it a lot less if I use a preshave. My current go to preshave is Noxema. I also noticed that if I used a technique suggested by Glen that my soaps all seemed to perform better. If you lather your face and leave it set while you strop your razor, so just a few minutes, and then either wipe it off and regather or simply moisten the tip of the brush and regather, it seems to make the soap quite slick. Glen said it was to raise the whiskers up, but I mostly noticed the added slickness. Both ways make my shaves better because my soap seems to perform better.

Indeed, some soaps seem to be getting right by the 3rd pass.
On those, I load the brush and let it sit bristles-down in a cup awhile. Seems the soap is mingling with the water after a bit and goes on much nicer.
Never happens with MDC.

Could also be that not enough water was used for the first pass. That has happened to me making the subsequent passes seem slicker.

Bob

JMO
I now live in a hard water area. I must leave the soap for at least two to three minutes to get a slick lather. Even creams such as Bigelow/ Proraso requires time to become fully hydrated.
And, it takes about double the amount of product to make decent lather.

~Richard

I have pretty hard water, I think this morning I will try loading the brush before I shower, and see what that does.

so this morning I took my badger brush, soaked it with warm water while I stropped, loaded it with some taylor of old bond sandalwood cream, gave it just enough swirls in a bowl to get the water loaded into the cream, then took a 10 min shower, and then went to shaving. and man what a difference. the first pass was way slicker than even the last pass of anytime ive used it before, and the last pass was even better.

so now to try that out with my other favorites and see if its consistent

Originally Posted by BobH

Could also be that not enough water was used for the first pass. That has happened to me making the subsequent passes seem slicker.

Bob

This. I notice it every shave. But when I try to get the lather to 'second pass state' on initial lathering, it ends up too wet and runny. I've come to accept that for some things there is no shortcut...

Sounds as if our own Mr. Calton will be on TV on the 17th!
Looking forward to it and the best of luck!

that is a tough thing to do, to stick with one soap or cream and really learn it when there are so many out there that smell so good. but this just seemed to be so consistent with all of my soaps and creams and it just struck me the other day what it was. and I'm still learning brushes, I have a couple of the cheap synthetic ones from maggards, and then the other day I orderd one of their badger knots and made a handle for it and it is really nice.

thanks dave and Sharpton for the good luck wishes! Yes I will be on forged in fire on april 17th at 7:00 mountain time. its season 5 episode 6 for those out of the us that might be on different tv schedules. I went to new York last august to do the episode, but they said I couldnt say anything about it until they emailed me yesterday.

I cant say how it turned out, but I can say that it was a lot more fun than I thought it would be {I wasn't going to go, but my wife told me she thought it would be a good idea}. I do hope that it is a good episode :}