Yesterday, I took a little detour to a part of town I don't get to very often to check out a little independent barber supply shop I've heard about. They had a great selection of inexpensive after shaves and I took advantage of the chance to smell a bunch of them. They also had a small selection of Merkur razors. I've been thinking about a Progress for a while since I've never tried one and they had one long-handle in stock so I took it. This morning was my first shave with it. Even though it's too soon to give a thorough review, here are my initial thoughts. Build quality is typical Merkur, which is to say it's decent. Mine doesn't seem to have any plating issues and the blade aligned perfectly with no fiddling. The adjustment dial on mine seems to be calibrated just fine too. My first blade in this one was a Gillette 7 O'Clock Black and the shave this combo gave was really good. I turned it to 3 for my WTG pass and this razor is a very smooth shaver. The first pass left me with very little left to do. So I turned it down to 2 and went right to a mostly ATG pass. 2 passes, no touch-ups and as close to BBS as I really ever get. Nice. I had no burning or stinging at all from my after shave and that's about the highest compliment I can give to any razor. The only thing I had any problem with was the handle. I was using Tabac soap and even a trace of that on my fingers left the razor a bit hard to hold onto. So I found myself going to the towel to make sure my hands were dry a lot. Other than that, no problems. For the past 2 weeks, I've been shaving with my Futur so I'm in a pretty good position to compare the two directly right now. Both are great shavers but they are different. I find the Futur easier to hold onto but the balance of both is great. The long-handled Progress has a neutral balance which is my preference. In other words, it's not head-heavy like the short-handled one felt to me. I like that both razors put more curve on the blade than a lot of other razors. That allows me to hold the handle a bit closer to my face and feels more natural. The edge on hitting tight spots probably goes to the Progress. I've figured out how to get under my nose just fine with the Futur but it took more than one shave to figure that out. The Progress gets there just like anything else but smoother than most. I'm planning to stick with this razor for the next 2 or 3 weeks and run a few different blades through it so I'll give some updates along the way.
Just had to give a quick update. It's about 9 hours since my shave and the stubble is just barely there now. The shave from the Progress is right there with any of my best shaves right out of the gate. It's pretty rare that a razor does that for me on the first try so I'm pretty happy with it. We'll see how it goes the next few weeks.
Nope. None. Skin is completely happy That's actually the way I decide when to trash a blade most of the time. When I get irritation that comes on later, I know the blade's getting rough and if I keep pushing it, I'm usually even more sorry on the next shave. This was the first shave on this blade and I expect it to last at least 4-6 more.
