Feb 10
A cold weekend
This has really been a down weekend for me. The weather is miserably cold. Our current temperature is 10° / -12° with a windchill figure of -10° / -24°. The sun is shining brightly, but you certainly don’t want to step out doors for any reason.
So the weekend has been a bit on the dull side.
I did manage to get my 2007 federal and state tax returns figured. 
Maybe that is why the weekend seems so bad?
Last evening’s shave was certainly a bright spot in an otherwise colorless day. I tried a shaving stick, supplied to me by Giovanni at Barbieria Italiana and really didn’t have a lot of luck with it. I’m pretty set on mixing lather in a bowl and it’s pretty difficult to properly load a brush with soap, when using a shave stick. I suppose using a shaving stick to face-lather is another story. The soap really smelled great, but I ended up with a pretty thin lather. I made my usual North-South pass with my Merkur 23C and a Derby blade, noticing the razor was gliding nicely on the little bit of lather I was able to produce. After the first pass, it was obvious I was going to need to go through the entire brush loading process again. I rinsed out the bowl and the brush and grabbed a tub of Mama Bear’s Turkish Mocha. A couple minutes later, I was working with a bowl of rich lather. I finished up with two more passes, a cold water rinse and a splash of Pinaud Clubman aftershave. Ahhhh, another excellent shave.
Send warm weather.
February 11th, 2008 at 7:18 pm
Shavesticks ain’t gonna work for you unless you rub them around your beard (like using an underarm deodorant except on your face). Then face lather with a nice wet brush. You will build up enough lather in your brush for many passes.
I’m mainly a creamer with foray’s into Mitchells Wool Fat & the BI shavesticks The BI shavesticks do lather up like crazy using the technique described above. I love the “PermaFrost” altho if you’re freezing already no sense freezing your face while shaving.
Give it a whirl when it warms up. I live in TW part of FL so a PermaFrost frozen face always
feels great.
February 12th, 2008 at 6:22 am
I’m so accustomed to building lather in a bowl that it will be a new learning process to face-lather.
I like to rotate creams and soaps. The Mitchell’s Wool Fat is a soap I would like to try. I’ve a sample of their bath soap and it seems quite nice.
I’m probably not going to be much of a Permafrost customer, as I’m just not into the heavy mentholated products. I know Giovanni has a lot of Permafrost ‘converts’ however.