took a trip up to Minneapolis St paul this weekend, great city by the way, excellent food and beer and things to do. anyway I went to shave and they have very soft water so the lathering was easy but mostly that water is a wonderful advantage for shaving. Just the water alone feels slick on the skin and adding some thin soap film makes the face a slip and slide for the razor. It is a crazy advantage. My kans-ass hard water just strips everything off the face and leaves your skin dry and makes razors jump. it is a huge crazy difference. you soft water shavers have a huge advantage and i think soaps need to be manufactured for either hard or soft water since the hard water needs more slick. just my 2 cents.
My impression is that the lower the mineral content in the water, the easier it is to get the lather to perform as it should. When I am traveling in countries that have reputations for not completely sanitary water, I tend to use bottled water for shaving. Once I used distilled water. Wow! That was one of the best lathers I have ever made. If it weren't about the same price as gold, I would use it daily.
It's like cheating. If I had Softwater I would probably be perfectly happy with Williams and a six dollar brush.
I also live with hard water and agree - yes, water hardness does make a huge difference I was pretty demanding of soaps before, but once we moved into central Canada, which has some pretty hard water, I became really particular about my lather. There are some soaps that seem to perform just fine in soft water, but simply cannot handle hard water well. On the up side, there are soaps that can overcome the hard water issues and can still perform well without the soft water treatment. Soft water will probably always produce better results, but you can still get great stable, slick lather using hard water. A good hard water trick is simply to ensure you use more and more product! Especially with dense badger brushes, I make sure to really load a lot of soap onto my brush before building the lather. As long as you aren't creating dry lather, then too much soap can never be a negative in term of performance.
I've pretty much learned to live with hard water but I do get jealous every time I travel to a place with soft water.
I have pretty soft water and it does make it easier to use a nice variety of soaps/creams. If the water is a problem, some people use bottled or distilled water to make lather. Gotta do what you gotta do to get a good lather.
I just recently moved from Philly to Delaware and can't tell any difference in making a lather. Guess I'm lucky, before I found these forums I always thought hard water was ice.
I am a Newbie but I have a water softener in my home. I don't have a lot of soaps but I can lather Marvey and VDH just fine. I also have Arko and have Proraso Green and Red on order. I used cartridges before and just used my bath soap and my hand in the shower and it lathered pretty well. I thought about try my brush and bath soap to see if it would do better than just my hand. LOL
I like the brush and soap scents so I will work on my DE Technique. If I need a Quick shave I can take the brush and soap in the shower and use a cartridge. My technique is not good enough to do that in the shower yet.
