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The theme for today was “retreat”. Yesterday's foreshortened straight razor shave, a sort of forced hybrid hydra with a Feather cut throat for a head and a Gillette DE for the hindquarters, didn't really do it for me. Neither fish nor fowl. A good shave, all told, but not a great shave.

So today I scurried back to the one tried and true wetshaving rig that's never let me down (of course, just tagging it as such now sets it up to let me down at some point down the road, but in blogging terms that's great because it's built-in fodder for plus-size navel-gaze) -- the Merkur HD safety razor, the Vulfix #377 brush, and Proraso's green eucalyptus cream in the tube.

There's nothing cool or sexy or swank about these components. Being non-adjustable and cheap, the HD is considered nothing more than a beginner's DE -- everyone's “first DE”, the safety razor you graduate to from a Mach3, the loyal first wife you ditch just as soon as you start getting good shaves with it because you're a dumbass just like the rest of us who started with an HD and you think spending some long green on an adjustable DE, whether one of Merkur's upscale jobs or an old Gillette crusted over with some octogenarian's ass whiskers you scored off eBay, is going to magically give you a better shave when you barely know how to use a DE in the first place.

The Vulfix 377 is a nice, big, soft-bristled super badger brush that's more shaving brush than anyone, I don't care who they are, will ever need. But it's reasonably priced for a large, super grade badger brush (90 bucks if I'm not mistaken, or less than a fourth of what a similarly sized brush from Simpson costs), has a non-descript handle that doesn't look like it came out of Churchill's dop kit and is made of ivory-colored plastic instead of pre-ban Dumbo choppers.

Proraso shaving cream I've praise-sung previously. It's cheap, it's abundant, it's 50 years old, and it kicks ass.

When I picked up a DE razor for the first time, it was a Merkur HD shaving on a bed of Proraso lather. It took me awhile to learn the difference between shaving with a modern pivoting catridge razor and shaving with a fixed-head DE, but once I did I was blown away by how much closer and smoother the Merkur shaved my face, and how all the red marks on my neck just suddenly went away for good once I retired the Mach3.

But of course the upgrade bug bit me, and I tried all the expensive razors -- Merkur's Futur, Vision and Progress, as well as the vintage Gillette adjustables I picked up on eBay. In every case, I started off getting a worse shave with each of these razors than I did with the humble HD, and even when I got used to them and became more adept, none of them ever shaved me “better” than the HD. The adjustable Merkurs made more noise when slicing whiskers, which was cool, and the Gillette seemed to allow for much more slop factor without nicks and cuts, but in the end, I never pushed my shaves beyond what I routinely got from the HD.

And today was no different. The combination of the HD, Proraso, and the Vulfix brush is just unbeatable. It's eleven hours after I shaved and my face still looks clean-shaven. Zero irritation, zero complications, zero effort. It's basically everything the Mach3 Power promises you, except that the Merkur actually delivers.

Why I ever shave with anything else is beyond me.