A Blind Study? One Shaving Cream To Rule them All.

As i was going for my shave last night i noticed im going to have to buy some more Shaving Cream. But with whatb brand to go with? Everyone has there Go too shaving cream or are still trying every brand until they find that go to cream.
So here is what i was thinking. We take the top 10 brands (not worring about sents) Disturbute it at one of the Meets between 10 drifferent wet shavers just giving them enought for one shave per cream in a dime bag or some thing. Have one person to mark the bags 1 thur 10.They would have to agree to use the same brush,razor,pre-shave, and prep for each shave so we can remove some of those other factors.
Judged only on Texture,Latherability,Cushion,and Moisterising. 1-5 scale. Have the guys post there findings as they go and at the end of it reveal what creams they have been using.

It was just a idea that i thought would be cool. I also think it would be very helpful for our newer members.

Sounds like a good idea.

We have a Toronto area meet coming up in 3 weeks, so how do we do it?

I like the idea, and I'll volunteer my face for testing.

How do we chip in for this, and what brands do we use. It'll get expensive if someone wants to put Martin de Cadre in a dime bag!

This might work....

In the online flyfishing community we have fly swaps that are done by mail. Here's how it works.

Lets say we have 10 people interested in doing this. Each one prepares 10 doses of soap or cream in a small bag or plastic bottle and sends them to the swapmeister with a note telling him what the brand is. The swapmeister ends up with 10 sets of 10 doses. He then makes 10 sets with one of each in them and mails those out to each of the 10 participants. Each participant is responsible for supplying their 10 doses and enough money for return postage of the "variety" pack. The swapmeister is the organizer and keeper of the list.

After everyone involved has had a chance to use all 10 soaps and grade them, they send their results to the swapmeister and he publishes the results.

I would suggest that we use small ziploc bags that we can buy at very low prices. We can distribute 10 bags to every participant at the meet and go from there.

What do you think?

Ziploc bags would work great. i think because we are meeting we can just divy it out there we dont have to worry about mailing it out. And we should keep it as a unknown as to what your shaving with until everyone is completed with all the creams. Just need to get more guys on board. What should be the 10 different shaving creams be?

I'm not sure how practical this is, considering that the top shave creams are insanely expensive, with the best ones being discontinued at an alarming rate. As well, how are you going to compile a top 10 list?

Here, I'll narrow it down to the top 3 for you: Domenico Caraceni, Castle Forbes and Xpec.

Sorry to be a stickler here, but there's no point going to that amount of trouble if you have no replication per cream type. As it reads, you have 10 creams being used by 1 member each. So 10 members? Please correct me if I am wrong on that - it is not immediately obvious from your original post.

Anyway, if that is in fact the case, no matter whether you make them use the same razor, same brush, same everything, you have not isolated (and never will) the experiment down to just cream differences. All you will get is 10 different impressions from 10 different people. How do you know, for example, that any differences in ratings for the creams are not in fact actually differences between the members? You cannot. They are confounded with cream types.

Now if you replicated - gave each cream to say 10 people, so 100 people were involved, then at least you could get the average rating for each cream (from the 10 replicated users in each cream) and do a meaningful comparison between the averages, perhaps. The reason to do this is to account for the different types of ways this data will vary. The scores from the 100 people will vary of course - we would not expect all 100 scores to be the same. This variation can, with proper replication, be decomposed into how much of that total variation is explained by the different creams, and anything left over. If the amount explained by the cream dominates the amount left over (or not explained by the creams), you can say that there are cream effects. If on the other hand the variation explained does not dominate, then you can say that cream has no more effect than random person to person effects.

Clearly you cannot do much about the cream effects (how much variation cream explains) since you know very little about it (hence your proposal to do an experiment to find out). However, you do have some inkling as to what might impact on the shave rating apart from the cream (the unexplained or left over variation in the preceding paragraph). Controlling this kind of variation is what statisticians call experimental design. It includes mundane things like collecting information on anything that you think may impact the shave rating on a person to person basis - skin type, experience level, razor size, brush type, socioeconomic status etc - and either accounting for them in subsequent analyses or building the experiment around them in some way. You suggested a "make everyone use the same equipment" kind of experiment, which is fine, but you cannot make everyone use the same skin type (which in my mind would probably be a very important factor in assessing creams) for example. There are a lot of ways to do these kinds of things.

In any event, my point is that if you are going to do this, you may as well do it right and at least try to use replication. Replication is far more important than making something "blind".

James.

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Originally Posted by Jimbo

Sorry to be a stickler here, but there's no point going to that amount of trouble if you have no replication per cream type. As it reads, you have 10 creams being used by 1 member each. So 10 members? Please correct me if I am wrong on that - it is not immediately obvious from your original post.

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My idea was for 10 members to shave with all 10 different creams and see what we come up with in the way of results. I agree a larger study would be better but we are just a bunch of normal guys that liked the idea of trying 10 different shaving creams each and put a rating to them.
Maybe a supplier would like to do the 100 person study but im not going too.

Really, I just think it would be fun to see what would happen when other people are involved....and to try different soaps without knowing what they actually are.

I already have my top 5, and I'll most likely stick with them....but you never know, maybe this way I get to try Castle Forbes or Mama Bear, neither of which I have ever ordered before.

I don't think we really need to make an engineering study out of this experiment. I think it was intended, and Trillium correct me if I'm wrong, ...but I think it was intended to be "just plain ol' fun".

And there's certainly no harm in that.

For it to be a valid study you would need one person to pick the soaps and number them and another who doesn't know the brands or numbers to distribute them and all shavers would have to shave together with the lather made by one person so the lather quality would be the same from soap to soap.

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Originally Posted by TrilliumLT

My idea was for 10 members to shave with all 10 different creams and see what we come up with in the way of results. I agree a larger study would be better but we are just a bunch of normal guys that liked the idea of trying 10 different shaving creams each and put a rating to them.
Maybe a supplier would like to do the 100 person study but im not going too.

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No, my bad. When I read your OP I thought it sounded like 1 person, 1 cream. If it is each cream per person, you have a repeated measures study and it is essentially equivalent, in terms of replication, to 10 separate people per cream (or a 100 person study). So that should be good.

James.

This sounds like an interesting idea, but I suspect we could do all the double-blind, variable-controlled experiments we want on every cream made, and we'd end up right back where we always do with creams/soaps, and other personal products....wait for it...YMMV.:gl:

For anyone who doubts this, just do a search on this forum, or B&B (even more so, much more cream and soap wars over there for whatever reason) for Williams, Tabac, or MWF.:popcorn:

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Originally Posted by Jimbo

Sorry to be
.....
James.

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Jimbo for swapmeister 0'11!!!!

Speaking from the perspective of a newbie, this is an interesting idea. I'm pretty sure there won't be any great revelations in this, but its seems like a nice way to try 10 different soaps or creams (even if it is for just one shave) just to get an idea of scent and other things you can see right away. I'm still working on my first tub of Proraso and just don't have the heart (or finances) to buy 10 different soaps to try. My main obstacle is what happens if I just plain old don't like the scent or the way it feels on my face?

This way I can get an idea of what to try next without going into it completely blind.

If you guys do this you probably should aim for 2-3 shaves with each cream. I know it takes me that many tries to get proper lather whenever I get a new soap or cream that I'm not familiar with. Although I may be biased because I use almost exclusively soaps and then the amount that the brush picks up when I'm loading it can vary dramatically depending on how hard the soap is. With cream you know exactly how much you're using.

Maybe it will be "fun." One thing (the only thing?) I have learned over my years of straight shaving is that there is no"best." There is the hand and the mind of the operator, both of which are in constant flux, and from those two variables, all results depend.

Enjoy.

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Originally Posted by TrilliumLT

in a dime bag or some thing

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Did someone say dime bag count me in

This is a very interesting idea, but the scents might mess up the "double-blind" part. I know that even with my eyes closed I can tell proraso and Martin de candre apart from anything else. Just a thought :)

Also, it would be better to use experienced members so any inexperience making lather is removed.

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Originally Posted by Dllandry

Did someone say dime bag count me in

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I was going to try smoking the menthol Proraso I have but I just couldn't get the darn thing to light :)

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Originally Posted by joebehar

I was going to try smoking the menthol Proraso I have but I just couldn't get the darn thing to light :)

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Have you tried making brownies with it?

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Originally Posted by TrilliumLT

One Shaving Cream To Rule them All

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That will never happen, but I like the idea you offered. In fact I am pretty sure I have enough shaving soap and cream I have hardly even used at home to perform this study for myself

Even if it doesnt happen for us at the Toronto Meet on Oct 22. I think it would be fun to see the results from 10 different users from another meet.