Hi everyone! A newbie to the wet shaving hobby...have acquired a Ming Shi 3000, a Parker Variant, a dscosmetic stainless T7 and waiting for a 66 Gillette Slim that I bought on Ebay. Living in Thailand limits my purchasing power due to customs duties and postage rates but trying the best to get quality soaps, I make my own beard oils and butters and balms, the oils are good preshave products and am considering making my own soaps. Just received a variety back of 16 different de blades from amazon, so abusing my skull to finger the best combos for the perfect head shave...lol. Looking forward to discussions on shaving and collecting all the great things about the hobby!
Welcome aboard. One thing I would recommend with soaps get a few different hair types of brushes. Depending the consistency of the soap certain hair brushes make better lather than others. You have stiff hair brushes like Boar and more soft haired like Badger. Horse hair brushes are somewhere inbetween and recommended if you are vegan and/or animal cruelty free type of person. You also have synthetic hair brushes which tend to be super soft like nylon and other materials. Unless there is import issues Yaqi which are Chinese made have some good cheap options except for horse hair brushes. Horse hair the biggest maker of those that I know of are the Vie Long brand brushes made out of Spain. Soaps, stuff like Arko and Proraso you should be able to source locally or through a pacific rim marketplace equivalent to Rakuten in Japan without paying crazy import and shipping fees.