Thread: My limited experience with soaps/creams

Originally Posted by JimR

One piece of advice--stick to ONE product until you can use it. They all are a little different, and if you hop around too much you'll only end up confusing yourself. Stick to one product until you can lather it consistently, then try to change it up.

Good luck!

+1 on this technique. That is exactly what I do when I try a new soap. I'll use it for a week or two straight to make sure that I can get the best consistent results from one product.

Originally Posted by Ryan82

+1 on this technique. That is exactly what I do when I try a new soap. I'll use it for a week or two straight to make sure that I can get the best consistent results from one product.

If you guys all would use the soap lathering technique given by Kaptain_Zero in the pasted post below, it woudn't matter how hard your water is, how soft your brush is, and you wont have to worry about ruining your soap.

I had been putting about a tablespoon of hot water on my soap pucks (as I think alot of guys do), and while the results weren't bad, the Kaptain's method is far better:

Originally Posted by kaptain_zero

As you can tell, everyone has their own way of making lather from soap and everyone has their own choice of soap and choice of brush. Having been where you are now and not knowing the soap that you are using, but having a good hunch about what's going wrong, I'm am going to say you have too little water in the brush.

Try this the next time you go to make lather... I am going to possibly cause you to make more lather than you will know what to do with, but at least you will have made sufficient amounts of thick lather to get you through your 3+ pass shave and that should make for a nice change from what you have gotten so far.

1. Soak your brush for several minutes in quite warm tap water. I stand my brush in a mug and gently press the bristles against the inside of the mug a few times to release all the trapped air in the bristles. Do not put any water on your soap, it won't be needed.

2. After the brush has soaked in the water for a few minutes (mine will sit for maybe 5 minutes or more but 3 minutes should be sufficient) lift it out of the water and let it drain by itself until it stops running... it's ok if there is a drip or two coming from the brush. Now, *gently* flick the brush ONCE to remove some excess water... there may still be too much but it won't matter this time around as we're looking for MORE than enough lather.

3. Swirl the brush on top of your soap and pump the brush up and down to release the water from within the knot and to allow the brush to soak up some soap with that water as brush comes back up. Keep swirling/pumping until it's starting to look like decent lather, it needn't be ready to use, just that it's no longer runny and there aren't any large bubbles... By the way, no need to swirl like a madman, nor should you be particularly gentle, just swirl at something like 2 beats a second or so. Now that the soap/water is holding together on your brush can now begin to build the lather in a bowl or on your face. If water starts dribbling down your face, you didn't pump the brush enough while on the soap and thus there is just water deeper in the knot instead of a soap/water mix... that's ok, just go back on the soap and do a few more swirls while pumping.

You should be rewarded with ample amounts of lather if you do it this way. I have found that many times we try to rely on the brush abrading the soap and try to pick up enough soap that way instead of using enough water to dissolve the soap and pumping the brush to mix the soap and water together inside the brush.

Too little water in the brush to start means not enough soap dissolved, Adding water to the mug when you're trying to build the lather will just further dilute the already too little soap and you'll end up with a thin lather that just seems to evaporate in seconds on your skin.

Now, if you ended up with enough lather to shave ten men, I apologize and humbly suggest you perhaps flick the brush a little bit more next time. It's easier to shoot for the middle when you know what the boundaries are.

My two cents worth, and I find the instructions above will build lather from any type of of shaving soap with no soaking of the soap required.


Regards

Christian

This technique even works well on my Gold-Dachs Especial, which isn't one of the best soaps to get a really good lather from.