Wednesday April 12 -- "almost" Arko Adjustable April
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Prep: Hot water and soap face wash
Razor: Gillette SuperAdjustable refurbished and cerakoted by Delta Echo Razors (dial 4)
Blade: Israeli Personna Super Platinum (3)
Brush: APShaveCo Elegant Emerald with APLuxury badger/boar mixed knot
Soap: J.M. Fraser's Shaving Cream (croap)
Post: Rinse, alum, rinse, Murray & Lanman Florida Water Cologne
My last shave was on Sunday, so three days ago. Getting better...one day less than the last gap and much better than my usual ten-day average over the last couple years.
I called this an "almost Arko" shave, because J.M.Fraser's shaving cream was Canada's national equivalent of Arko -- a well-made generic commercial shave cream that was cheap and available everywhere. It even smells like lemon, too, though a less "industrial" lemon than Arko. And as late as 2015, a one-pound (450 gram) tub cost about $10 Canadian -- not bad for a year's worth of shaving cream.
J.M Fraser was a druggist in the then-small city of Winnipeg Manitoba who developed the shaving cream in 1956. It quickly became his main business and for several decades was found in nearly every drugstore or barbershop across Canada. Some time in the 1990s or early 2000s, the brand was bought by a national beauty products conglomerate, and at some point production also moved to Toronto. The shaving cream was a niche product for the conglomerate, but with production line capital costs long since amortized, it brought in a respectable addition to the conglomerate's bottom line, so production continued. Until the Covid pandemic hit. Rather than make the changes to the production facility required to meet the new pandemic worker safety regulations, the conglomerate shut down the line "temporarily". And then later announced that it wouldn't be re-starting production because that wouldn't be "cost effective" -- especially for a product that was not part of the "core business". Thus ending a 60-year fixture on the Canadian shaving scene...
The APShaveCo mixed badger/boar brush works very nicely. It has the softness of badger with the backbone of boar, and somehow seems less thirsty than either type of hair alone. I soaked the brush under running hot water for about half a minutes, shook it out a bit, then swirled it in the shaving cream. After about five years in my cupboard, the cream is slightly drier and harder than it used to be but still dents easily. The brush picked up a working layer of cream with two or three swirls, then quickly painted a good coat of lather on my face.
I have mainly used injectors for the last year, but by this second shave with the Gillette SuperAdjustable, I am back to finding the correct angle automatically with this DE. (Isn't muscle memory wonderful?) As I said last time, I set my Gillette adjustables on 4 and then just forget about the adjustment feature.
One pass WTG on my face and ATG on my neck had me cleanshaven again. No blood spots or nicks and the alum was silent.
I am now smooth and smell good thanks to the Florida Water.
(I was going to post a photo, but got a message that the file was too large. Even though last shave's worked fine... Edit: I switched the photo from colour to B&W,which cut the file size in half, and then it uploaded...)
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