Thread: Williams through history - the great shootout!

The suspense is killing me, which Williams won?

Will I have to build a Williams soap aging cellar near my shave den inside my man cave?

Maybe it's just taken this long to work up a decent Williams lather

All this talk about williams I had to pull out the puck I had stashed and whip it up last night. I have a oilly skin type to begine with. The Williams seemed to dry out my face a little bit. Do all soup do this or just the Williams. I have only been at this a little will shaved with DE'S for a month and just switched to striatghts a couple days ago. The Williams is the only soap I tried sofare been using creams I liked that it didn't leave my face oilly so I could use some after lotion. This was the first shave all the way throght with the straight no DE toch up. On my way. Just order some SRD soaps see if I'll like them. Compared to creams?

With all the +s and -s discussed about Williams soap, I decided I needed to get some and try that old standby(?). Well, I couldn't get it to lather worth a hoot. Of course, I generally can't get soaps to lather all that well, but I thought that something that has been around that long just has to be good, and a dependable performer. I'll have to try it again, but my hopes aren't great. I wish these soaps would lather up as well and as easily as Redi-Whip.

Hmmm, maybe I should be trying Barbasol.

Originally Posted by HNSB

I need a couple more shaves before I post thoughts on the old Williams. The results were... unexpected.

I just had a second shave with it and there were some differences from the first shave. After I see some consistency I'll post about it. It's possible that for one reason or another one of the shaves was a fluke.

Five days later I am starting to wonder whether there is any consistency to be seen

Originally Posted by hoglahoo

Five days later I am starting to wonder whether there is any consistency to be seen

The OP is sportin' a four day beard...

Ok, I have enough shaves on these soaps to post some thoughts:

Old Williams has much better cushion than the new stuff, and it conditions the skin much better (in fact, it's probably one of the best soaps I've used in terms of how my skin feels after the shave). The lather is also very long lasting - there were no problems with it drying out. The old Williams does not provide very good glide at all. It's about the same as Tabac that way - and I don't consider that to be very good.

I could not tell a difference between either of the vintage Williams soaps, and I could not tell a difference between an "aged" modern puck and a new puck. I could definitely tell a difference between the old and the new. The new stuff smells much better, but doesn't have nearly as much cushion and the lather is not as creamy.

The first shave with the old Williams (both pucks) was probably one of the worst shaves I've had since I began wetshaving. I am not sure what happened, but it was a huge disappointment. That's why I wanted to try again before posting results. When the second shave was better, I decided to wait to report until I did a couple of more shaves. I can only speculate as to why the first one was so bad - I wonder if it had to do with the surface of the old puck being affected by aging so long?
The second through fourth shaves were all basically the same. Both pucks performed the same on all of the shaves. I couldn't tell the slightest bit of difference.

I do not care for the smell of the older Williams. The new formula has that really great scent, the old stuff smells "mediciny" and reminds me of old people.

I didn't bother with pictures of the new Williams - you all know what it looks like.

The newer of the vintage stuff, note that the packaging lists the ingredients - unlike the new stuff, tallow is the main ingredient:




Long lasting lather? You bet.



Packaging for the really old stuff, so old there are no ingredients listed. I am pretty sure the ingredients are the same as the other old stuff.




Is it a lasting lather? It sure is.

Now the fun part:

I made some slides and looked at the lather under a microscope. These are all at the same magnification - the manufacturer says it's 500x, I say it's about 150x...
The white dots are bubbles. What looks like "lather" inside the bubbles on some of the pictures is where the bubble is pushing against the back of the slide. Notice how much smaller the bubbles are in the old soap vs. the new. I think there is probably a relationship between bubble size and the quality of the lather. I want to try taking pictures of more lather in the near future to see if that is the case.

The really old stuff:



The old stuff (from the packaging that had ingredients):





The new formula:

Good stuff. For folks who are worried about what's in their soap, old or new williams is about as plain of a list of ingredients I've seen.

With the new stuff (i've not used the old), I noticed that I can get it to turn into (and feel like) something similar to a higher end soap, but it takes about 3 times as long, and if you didn't know you could get somewhere with it, you might give up before you get there.

To me, with soaps like Tabac and creams like AOS that make a lather a lot easier, I'm not sure if I can tolerate all of the work that it is to make the new williams lather tight and creamy - it really takes a while. Especially if you're shaving every day in the morning - my daily shave is very early in the morning, and I don't want to get into all of the formalities I might get into on the weekend - it's a 5 minute or less deal including strop and/or maintenance honing during the week (read, a good quick single pass shave with some very minor touchups - the hair does grow back, you know...) - putting 90 seconds of lathering in there isn't something I want to do for a few pennies.

Originally Posted by DaveW

Good stuff. For folks who are worried about what's in their soap, old or new williams is about as plain of a list of ingredients I've seen.

With the new stuff (i've not used the old), I noticed that I can get it to turn into (and feel like) something similar to a higher end soap, but it takes about 3 times as long, and if you didn't know you could get somewhere with it, you might give up before you get there.

To me, with soaps like Tabac and creams like AOS that make a lather a lot easier, I'm not sure if I can tolerate all of the work that it is to make the new williams lather tight and creamy - it really takes a while. Especially if you're shaving every day in the morning - my daily shave is very early in the morning, and I don't want to get into all of the formalities I might get into on the weekend - it's a 5 minute or less deal including strop and/or maintenance honing during the week (read, a good quick single pass shave with some very minor touchups - the hair does grow back, you know...) - putting 90 seconds of lathering in there isn't something I want to do for a few pennies.

What's interesting about that is that Williams is the soap I always grab when I'm in a hurry. I get functional face lather from it very quickly. I guess it's a YMMV sort of deal.