Thread: Pre-Shave Oils

Hi I'm new here and new to this community as a whole, but I do have a wide variety of experience with shave oils as my prep to my shaving routine with cartridges. I used to prep my cartridge shaves similar to how most straight/DE users prep: shower/conditioner on beard, lather in bowl with brush, oil on face, brush lather over oil, etc.. all in the shower. I can't speak directly for oil with straight/DE shaves (yet!), but these are my experiences with cartridges.

IMHO

I started out with Art of Shaving oil. The AOS oil is relatively thick, smells nice, and gave me perfect cartridge shaves without any burn or ingrowns. Most of my girlfriends tell me I had the best shaved face of anyone they've ever met, and I attributed this to the oil. I swore I'd never go back, but decided to try out some other mainstays.

The Trufitt & Hill oil is thin and runny. It tended to get in my brush and gunk it up. Also I started getting razorburn again while using T&H oil. I don't think I even finished the whole bottle of this stuff. It was also the most expensive stuff I've tried.

Next I tried a sampler of the Lab Series for Men shave oil. This struck a balance between the AOS and T&H oil, but had no scent. The shaves were decent, with only minor burn; unfortunately I only got about 3 shaves out of the sampler, so I can't talk to longevity.

A sampler of KingofShaves oil gave me about the same results.

Most recently I had a bottle of Anthony Logistics pre-shave oil. This was my favorite by far, and I used every single drop. It was amazingly thick and had a mild mint/menthol smell which lingered a bit and mixed with my aftershave for a nice effect. Ant's was thick enough not to get in my brush, and required just a little work to spread sufficiently. I never had a burn or a bump with this oil, even with lazy-5-10-shave-old cartridges.

I was considering order another bottle of Anthony's, but I decided I would try making my own with plain castor oil, olive oil, and a few drops of eucalyptus essential oil. I have yet to use this prep, but I can report back with my findings!

It's been about 2 months since my Ant's ran out, and my shaves once again consistently give me burn and give me bumps too if I've used the cartridge more than 3x. I'm sold on oil. Also for the record I don't think the oil does anything for the softness of whiskers. I think primarily it provides a smoother working surface. The oil provides a little "give" for your blade to bite into rather than into your skin, especially with the ATG motion. Just think about oil works on the surface of a lathe.