Saturday morning November 3 - "travelling" to the UK
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I shaved today using this vintage English (?) travel set. The overall result was good but some components worked better than others. I used everything including the soap. The soap rubbed onto my damp face alright but lathering it with the vintage boar brush proved a bit disappointing. I ended up with a very thin layer of slick soap film on my face but almost no visible lather. I didn't scrub vigorously with the brush as I wanted to be gentle with the old bristles. That may have been the problem. Or perhaps the soap never did lather up much but always acted more like a gel. Most probably though, it was a bit past its "best before" date.
The soap was slick enough so the first pass with the razor at least didn't draw any blood. Cushion seemed a little lacking. The OC razor has a two-post Gillette Old Type style of head but its shaving feel was closer to the milder Gillette NEW LC. It was pleasant shaving with it, even with the sub-par soap.
For the second pass, I brought in the pinch-hitter, Arko. I very quickly had a face covered with top-quality lather and the second pass was much more comfortable. The one fly in the ointment was a number of boar brush bristles stuck to my face -- the old brush shed a fair amount, especially when used with a soap that actually lathered up.
That was the other part of the shave that wasn't great: the brush is wispy without much backbone, thanks to a small knot coupled with a fairly high loft. Modern brushes tend to a loft of approximately double the knot diameter; this one is closer to triple. That might partly be due to bristle loss over decades of service, but my sense is that the brush hasn't really been used that much and was always rather wispy.
In the end, I ended up with a DFS after two passes. Alum was silent. I finished the shave with a simple application of Thayers Witch Hazel Original Astringent. The shave was serviceable but not luxurious. However, with a small stick of Arko or Palmolive replacing the expired Pears (or whatever it was) in the brush handle, and perhaps the brush reknotted with a knot from small Omega boar brush or even a small badger or synthetic knot of good quality, this set could really shine again.
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