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How long should you use a puck of shaving soap before discarding and starting a new one? Does it go bad? I've been using an AOS soap for about 8 months now and haven't made much of a dent in it, but it is starting to look funky. How long will a puck last, shaving every other day?
I've never had one last more than 4 months or so, even alternating between soaps. I am inclined to think that soap never "goes bad" however if it is a glycerine based soap, and is not sealed up, it will keep absorbing moisture from the air and eventually get kind of gummy and gross.
Starting to look "Funky".
In England funky is a modern word that means ...good, with it, up beat, trendy. It's not a word we would use to describe a soap. The word I would use is manky.
Just joking.
I have an AOS soap in its wooden bowl. When you first use it, it is important to settle the new soap into the bowl. By this I mean pushing the soap down into the bowl and pressing round the top edges to seal the soap in so that water doesn't get under the soap and make it manky. Sometimes it is easier to do this after applying hot water to the surface of the soap. It softens it.
This process works well if you use the soap daily as it never has time to dry out. At the end of the lathering process, I always wash off soap surface with cold water.It cleans the surface and seals it off for another day.
What I have found is that if you use more than one soap in a rotation, the oldest to be used can dry out so that it comes away at the edges in the bowl between uses. You will need to seal it back again to stop it going manky.
One final observation is that sometimes the dye from the wood in the bowl will seep into the soap. It is particularly noticeable with a white soap, but on coloured soap you may notice the circumference darken.
Non of any of the above has ever effected the performance of any of the soaps I have used but I have thrown away the final 1/16" of soap in the bowl because of the dye making the soap look dirty.
Having said this, any soap will go manky and soft and unusable if you leave it lying in water.
Oh, the soap will lasts at least a minimum of three months shaving on a daily basis.
Hope this helps.
I've got a well-used bowl I use; I've never seen the dye problem (don't think my bowl is even dyed). I simply go until there is almost nothing left except a ring (usually 1/3 of the way up the side) about 1/8 inch thick. At that point, the soap usually crumbles out of the bowl and breaks up rather than letting me lather it up.
Jim
Interesting Jim,
I can only recant my experience with my local water and I trust your experiences.
I have had the dye problem with Trumpers, T & H, Harris and now Floris. All the bowls were teak. Incidentally if you refill the old bowl, the dye leaching problem subsides eventually.
Maybe I should put the soap in a china bowl, but I suspect it might suffer the water problems that make the soap go manky.
All this said, I love the shave that I get from all of the above tripple milled soaps and wouldn't wish to change them despite their minor imperfections.