how long do you load your brushes?

having used a synthetic as my only brush for 8+ months and then digging out a badger brush today, I forgot how things need to be changed up...

how long do you load your brushes with the varying types of hairs..i.e., badger, boar, synthetic, etc.?

When loading my synthetics, I used to count the number of revolutions I would make on the soap, and usually 80–90 spins in the jar yielded pretty good results. However, I have since abandoned the counting and just go by feel.

A lot depends on how much water is introduced into the brush and at what point. Today I was in a bit of a hurry, and got a surprisingly nice lather using the Marco Method, which incorporates a lot of water up front. But usually I start loading with a semi-wet brush and add more water as I go. (This is an especially good idea with synthetics, which don’t hold on to water well and can spill it out if there’s too much hiding in the knot.)

I like 2 to 3 good shakes on a badger brush and then rub it lightly on my hand to open up the knot. Then I load for a period long enough to pull strings of dense protolather that is wet and stable on the puck. Sometimes it could be one minute and twenty seconds before moving off the puck to actually lather and further hydrate it.

I load all of my brushes for 20 seconds, swirling one direction for 10 and the other direction for 10. For creams, it only takes about 5 seconds.

Until they're full.

Sometimes more, sometimes less.

I don;t count how long, I go by visual cues. When the brush is about 50% loaded, time to move on. Some brushes take longer than others, some need to be wetter than others to activate that good capillary action.

For me...trying to reduce the process to a set of reliable steps doesn;t work. Every shave is different. There are, obviously, certain aspects to the process that never change, but different brush/soap/moisture combinations change things up. Nothing is "set in stone" in my process...

108 swirls with a gently-shaken but wet brush. Smaller brushes can be ready before, the behemoths I have sometimes take a few more, but that's my baseline.

I don;t count how long, I go by visual cues. When the brush is about 50% loaded, time to move on. Some brushes take longer than others, some need to be wetter than others to activate that good capillary action.

For me...trying to reduce the process to a set of reliable steps doesn;t work. Every shave is different. There are, obviously, certain aspects to the process that never change, but different brush/soap/moisture combinations change things up. Nothing is "set in stone" in my process...

What Chris said.

Since each brush I have does better with a different load, I go more by how much I've actually loaded onto the brush. More or less I'm looking for about a half-inch of paste loaded onto the end of the brush. I'm probably overloading a bit, but I've found even the soaps that technically work with less (MdC, Nuavia) really aren't at their best until I've loaded a decent amount. That said, I don't go TOO crazy either, since the more soap I load, the more time I need to take adding water and getting a good lather.

After shaking out excess water I usually load until at least the first band is full of soap. That seems to at least give me a visual indicator which has led to consistent results.