I agree. I found that shaving with an electric razor was the cheapest way to go. If you can get a few years out of $35 corded Norelco, nothing can compete with that. It got the job done (well enough), but it was no fun.
Honestly, does it really matter? We like buying wet shaving supplies. I start making my lather on the soap. I may use more product, but it's what works for me. I load it like I'm beating and it owes me money. It's quality over quantity my man. Don't get so hung up on cost analysis, but whatever works for you. Sent from my Nokia 6.1 using Tapatalk
(Video by Charlie on Norelco): "Hi guys, using Norelco today, here we go. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ. Thanx see ya next time".
I have two razors and five soaps. And five brushes as well. Before I joined the various shaving forums, I used one soap and one brush for years Still I am sure that, looking back at the past 35 years, I spent less on shaving than someone who went with all the latest cartridge razors all the time.
I've been using the kilo of Cella (crop) costing $37.00 this soap lasts me well over 2 years. If used exclusively the monthly cost would be $1.54 @ 2 yrs. I just started my third kilo and love this soap. I lightly swirl a wet brush over a piece in my bowl and get a fantastic lather.
The purpose of checking out the prices of these for me wasn't to discourage these consumptions, but rather to merely prove what I suspected that a $24 USA 'croap' is more costly long term than a >$100 French cake. I just feel like all these US 'artisans' are all the rage on the shaving boards now and if they're >$20 tubs of <120g of 'croap' then people are certainly spending $0.40/per or thereabout. More than Netflix, but if you makes you happy, money well spent. I think if I used a Chubby 3 and the Wholly Kaw I might be able to get near $1.00 worth of lather per shave - for me, that is rather spendy, and I do get cheaper happiness purchases in life. In fact Theophile-Berthon costs me about $0.04/per and I like it better.
It can be interesting - and surprising. But Jarrod’s example is consistent with my experience/experiments, value-wise artisan soaps can be one of the worst choices, other things like scent and personal preference notwithstanding. You need two pieces of information to determine the cost per shave, which is what we’re interested in not the price per tub/tube/puck, budgets and desires notwithstanding. Those are the price per gram of soap or cream, and the grams used per shave. Here’s a practical example. Proraso is known as a good quality cheaper cream. Castle Forbes has a reputation for high quality and a high price. Which one is cheaper to use? Castle Forbes. Proraso at shaving.ie is $7.95 for 150 ml, or 5.3 cents per gram. They sell Castle Forbes for $23.99/200g, or 12 cents per gram. All prices quoted are ex-VAT. It takes about 1.5 g of Proraso or about 8 cents per shave. It takes 1/2g of CF, or about 6 cents per shave. I’ve doled out CF carefully and you can shave for a year with a tub, for $24. Another gent on another forum did the same experiment a few years back, and he said that CF cost him 0.5-1 cent per shave more than Proraso. At any rate the difference in cost to use is essentially non-existent. And when drugstore.com closed out Pre de Provence hard soaps at $9 per 150g or 6 cents/g and about 3-4 cents/shave, that’s well toward Arko country and PdP is (IMO) a considerable better soap. So sometimes even ‘expensive’ soaps are a much better bargain that you might think, some soaps like CF are very concentrated, there’s a lot,of soap in that soap. Cheaper products usually have more water or are less concentrated.
I recently went on WCS and did a price per oz breakdown on just about every brand of soap they sell. I was waiting for a large document to print and had time to kill. It was surprising to learn the list of most expensive down to the cheapest was not quite what I was expecting. Of course, when you get down to the per shave cost it's usually a difference of just pennies. I'm not going to sweat pennies over something I really enjoy.
ah, but the <shaves> per ounce is being ignored with your analysis...an ounce is not an ounce in terms of actual uses look at my one example where the cost per ounce of the two soaps varied by ~4.7x (roughly $27.50 vs $5.7 per ounce), and yet the cost per shave was -16% for the soap that cost ~4.7x per ounce
Who is willing to get their scale out and weigh out their allotted portion of soap for the shave? Not I. I can appreciate the effort that is being put into this analysis, but in the end, I just want a great shave.