Sunday 9th May
L'Oreal Men Expert Pure Charcoal Face Wash
RazoRock SMDF Shaving Soap
RazoRock 400 Limited Edition w/Plissoft Noir 24mm
Yaqi AC w/Weber Bulldog Handle
Feather Professional (1)
RazoRock SMDF Aftershave
Well, that was a new experience ...
Much thanks to
@mpf9ret who sent me some blades to get started with. As it happens I still have a pack of Feather Professional and I think that's a good place to start given that I have direct experience of those when I used a Feather Artist Club razor some years ago and the likes of Schick ProLines and Kai Captains were not so east to come by. I'll use that as a baseline.
I'll open up a little and tell you that following a nasty head injury the February before last (yes, just before COVID lockdown so I got six weeks on everyone else before it started) I was left with some very specific flashback memories which I was very grateful to recieve some help from a Counsellor through last summer and into the autumn. As part of my wider health, I'm going through a period of challenging memories, assumptions and conclusions, and it is actually very useful to undertake such exercises in the mundane and entirely unconnected or unrelated areas of life - food, films, shaving, just go back to things already concluded upon and revisit them.
... and let the little grey cells heal away in the background.
Man up, dude! How was the shave?
I've always been fairly vocal that the single edge AC format is not for me. I've used and enjoyed the Feather Artist Club format and a few peripheral clones which use the same blades. I concluded that while I could, I simply preferred the Weck/Personna format and much preferred the GEM/Personna format. With my recent purchase of a vintage Durham Enders T-Type razor (a carpet blade razor about the width of these single edge AC razors but double edge), I got to thinking ...
The Yaqi AC comes in at the right price point for me to dip my toe. I am fully aware of which razor this is a copy of and I already had my reservations about the design of that razor - largely, to my mind a solution looking for a problem. I can see that when they figured out how to hold a GEM blade by dropping a threaded tab through the middle of the blade, the lightbulb went off. Still, to me, the razor is too narrow and has all the visual similarities of a long-sighted person pulling their head back to try to focus on something being brought before them. Literally every handle is too big and obscures part of the drainage gap under the comb. That, and the threaded tab. The design doesn't offer anything more functional than, say, the Hawk by doing this and introduces its own design for the sake of design. Form does not follow function.
Sheesh! This guy goes on ... the shave, man! The shave!!!
Good! Very good!! Being a completely new format, I took it very steady and absolutely heeded Mike's advice to keep a feather-light touch, which I translated as aim to shave the lather and let the sharpness of the blade take the stubble. Sage advice and it worked out really well. My usual single pass would have done it, and that's sticking to a very rigid WTG pass where my usual single pass focusses on pure efficiently and deviates from that by quite a margin. These blades are indeed very sharp!
I liked that I could use each side of the handle to shave smaller areas while the whole edge can happily be deployed for the main areas. My technical kinda mirrored straight edge shaving, certainly with a smaller disposable blade like the Weck/Personna format.
Yes, very good indeed!
I'm already part way into a month of enjoying classic Italian soaps - Cella, 3P, TFS, Vitos and SMDF with the addition of a couple of almond scented test candidates that I dug out of the loft from Meissner Tremonia. Given the life of these blades, I intend to use this razor for the remainder of the month (at least), finish out this first Feather blade and try out the ones from Mike.
For a first go, consider this assumption that the single edge AC format is not for me well and truly overturned.
Cheers all! Thanks for reading. As a final point while I have your attention, I'd encourage all folks who are experiencing health issues to do with mind, memory and emotion to talk to their GP and ask about IAPT:
https://www.england.nhs.uk/mental-health/adults/iapt/ - I guess NHS Scotland and NHS Wales (and any of your native countries) have similar programmes. Folks like me grit their teeth and push on through. We shouldn't ...
