What soap/cream did you use today?

Oleo Soapworks Irving Park

XPEC Unscented shaving cream (v.1) + Rose Essence oil/hydrosol

Grooming Dept Sandalwood Fig Musk

Wow what a busy week!  Two kids in the hospital. One kid in an auto wreck (not related to the hospital). Two broke-down vehicles (not related to the auto wreck).  You’d have guessed life was an unmitigated disaster around the Darrington households but it was not.  There were grandkids galore.  The house smelled of roast beef and brownies.  The ladies went shopping a lot.  I got to spend some alone time in the hospital with a couple.  Got to visit with my mechanic and a police officer I haven’t seen since he was with me in Alaska. Taught my son-in-law how to be towed.  And among all that still had time to run a patch down the barrel of all my pew sticks.  All vehicles are now running (except the one the teenager T-boned).  Poor kid learned a lesson about attentive driving and I hope he’s ok.  All my humans are out of the hospital.  Everyone is healthy and happy and I finally got a brush on top of a soap puck.  This time was a second Murphy and McNeil offering, Barbershop de los Muetos 2.  This one is more floral than BDLM 1 but I like it about as well.  Bills soaps are easy to work with and always smell great.  The art is a bit loud for my old man tastes, and the foil label makes one sure to be dressed before picture time, but man his offerings just work.  I understand this one sold out instantly. It’s fun to get to monkey around with these LE soaps but I sort of just like tried and true offerings better.  Too slow to win races I suppose.

Glad to hear everyone is doing well Lip!  Based on your post the other day, I went to the M&M website around 8:30 am on Saturday and they were sold out.  But I went ahead and ordered the BLM1...love that Kodiak base  

Just a few shaves left in this tub of “cream” that has turned to a soap.  I actually like it better as a dried out/load it in the tub cream.  Interesting road trip with this one.  When I first got it I was just learning of my love for vetiver and truly didn’t have a nose to pick out different kinds. (This one is pretty dank), but I knew I liked the orange top note and loved what I came to learn was the dirty vetiver below.  The change though is not that I like that scent, which I really do, but that the scent takes me back several years in my vetiver search and reminds me that one of the first vetiver-forward soaps I ever owned turned out to become one of my favorites.  Perhaps I need to hunt up a new tub now and get it drying hard for the next few years to come.  I suppose what I’d really like to find is an unloved, dried out old tub of this stuff. Such a very nice ride.  I’ll miss it when it’s gone.

D.R. Harris Marlborough Shaving Soap

Arancio Amaro v. (Tcheon Fung Sing) Red Hots

Arancio Amaro is Italian for “bitter orange.” When I ordered this soap, I thought I would be getting the sweet, sour smell of bigarade (bitter orange blossom) that forms the brilliant top note of many colognes. But clearly something’s been lost in translation. This soap smells nothing like bitter orange, neither the flower nor the fruit. It’s just a puff of generic floral bits mixed in with four quarts of fiery cinnamon. It’s fierce like the little Red Hot candies that turn your tongue crimson and make you gasp if you get too many at once. See the orange-red color of the label? That was the color of my face for forty-five minutes. I’m not even that sensitive to spicy aromas, but this stuff is so packed with Cinnamyl, it set me alight like a roman candle. When Tcheon Fung Sing puts Intenso and Forte (intense & strong) on the label, believe them. So Arancio Amaro is headed for the bin after only one use. A pity, since it made one of the glossiest lathers I’ve ever concocted. In fact, the shave was excellent, but the cinnamon burn was just too bitter to bear a second time.

   

Out of curiosity, I counted my opened soaps/creams today (not including duplicates) and we have 142. This is a sickness.

So if I shave every day in a rotation... I will use everything twice and some of them 3 times, per year.

And if we say there are on average 60 shaves per item (which is low-balling it, I have a lot of hard soaps).... That's over 23 years of daily shaves.

That's a lot of soap, Nero! 

From time to time my soap spreadsheet reminds me of a lesson my uncle taught me years ago when we first started riding snow machines in the Wyoming mountains. He said, "On one of these things you can ride farther in thirty minutes than you can walk in a day." I wish soap vendors carried a similar warning on their web sites: "You can buy more shaving soap in an afternoon than you can use in a lifetime."

I've got about 90 soaps on my shelf. Not counting the weight of the containers, that amounts to about 8.7 kilos of soap. Lately I've been using about 1.8 grams of soap per shave. At that rate, I should be well supplied through the end of 2033.

B&M - Leviathan