Thread: Dovo Red & Black pastes

At my latest trip to the store that sells SR relating goodies, the owner and I talked ad nauseam about anything SR.

There was one thing he sounded really fond of, and reading in older threads many others were as well, is the Dovo pastes, in particularly he talked about the red paste.

I was wondering if anyone has used the Dovo pastes - Red and Black and what your opinions are about them.

Before ordering them myself, I'd like to hear how you like 'em and what they bring to the table.


I was kind of a guy that said a well honed edge don't need pastes, but I'd still like to experiment and am curious about the results

I found that as my honing improved I only use my pasted balsa and felt paddle to refresh an edge between honing rather than as a finishing step.

I used and liked the red and black pastes for quite a while, using them after a coticule. I learned to hone in France and that's sort of how it's done there by many. I picked up a small, Solingen-style loom strop at a vide-grenier (sort of a collective garage sale held by a town or village) and sanded the sides to 180x and loaded one side with the red crayon and the other side with the black crayon. Paste is rubbed onto the thumbpad and then rubbed onto the leather from there. Red paste advances the coticule edge, leaving a closer shave from my experience and the black paste refines this. The last couple of years I've moved away from pastes, though, using natural stones like a purple Welsh slate instead or even Rhode Island cumberlandite, the latter of which sort of taking things back to the pastes in question as it contains ferric oxide.

OH YEAH!! Pastes! NOM, NOM.

I used Dovo pastes a lot back in the day. My preference is the green. I put it on little strip of balsa that I glued to hardwood. Loved it. I guess I would still love it, but I tried to narrow the "things" in my den, so I ultimately narrowed it down to a felt strop with a little diamond paste and CrOx. I'll pull the paddles out now and again and use em now and again. Just add a little water to get em lively again.

I'm not going to lie, both systems give me nice smooth shaves ... and allow me to be sloppy on the stones. Which is how I got to pastes to start with.

I finally ordered the double package of the red and black paste, will probably arrive next week, I'll keep yinz posted on the outcome of the pastes

Originally Posted by TristanLudlow

I finally ordered the double package of the red and black paste, will probably arrive next week, I'll keep yinz posted on the outcome of the pastes

What are you going to paste them on? I would suggest either a loom strop or vegetable-tanned leather sanded to give it some tooth before pasting. Russian leather wouldn't need sanding.