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The shaving mug is one of very few honored, old-as-the-@%#$-hills part'n'parcels of the old-school shaving routine that I find cheesy, for some reason. I mean, using an XXL mug to prepare your shaving lather in made a lot of sense in the days when gentlemen had nothing but a cheap bar of soap to make lather with -- the mug served as an effective receptacle in which to store the hard soap, swirl a wet brush around and around on the soap till a thick lather formed, and then stow the brush after the shave was done.

But these days -- and for the last several hundred years, since shaving cream first hit the scene -- do you really need a mug? Unless you're a hair-shirt anachronist and you won't shave with anything but a traditional hard soap, shaving cream makes soooo much more sense -- it's creamier, latherier, and lubes your skin so much more effectively than any hard soap I've ever tried. Smells a lot better, too. And one of the nicest things about a good cream is that you don't need a mug to build up a good head of lather -- you just swirl the tips of a wet brush around a tub of cream, just enough to get the tips creamy, and then you can either build the lather right on your face, or swirl the brush around in your other hand's palm for a bit till the lather explodes into a big white mound of meringe.

Still, there are some who claim that even if you use shaving cream, you should still build your lather in a mug. Mixing the cream and the hot water from your brush so that they create the optimim lather with which to shave is best done by beating your brush around and around, and pumping it up and down and up and down, in a goodly-sized shaving mug.

The minimalist in me says phooey to all this hackneyed jizzery. I routinely build shaving cream lather in the palm of my hand, and it's always perfectly adequate. Ah HA! Is adequate good enough? By definition, it must be. But can a mug do better?

This morning I danced with what brung me. The Merkur HD safety razor (loaded with a no-name Israeli DE blade, most probably made by Personna in their factory there), Vulfix #377 shaving brush, and Proraso cream in the green tube.

But instead of sqeezing out a dollup of cream from the tube into my left hand and swirling the Vulfix brush around to build the lather, I pinched off some cream onto the tips of the drenched brush and shoved it into the pewter shaving mug pictured above, beating and mashing and pumping and stirring until the entire mug was filled to the brim with thick, rich, glistening lather. At least five times the volume and density of what I usually build in my palm using the same starter daub of Proraso. The brush was literally choked with lather all the way down to the handle, instead of just on the top of the bristles as it is usually.

And the shave? Perfect. Baby's butt smooth. But then, it was perfect yesterday too, and I didn't use the mug. Just my hand.

Maybe Proraso doesn't need the sky high mashed potato trip to give good shave. It seems to shave equally well whether I lather in my palm, directly on my face, in a mug, or even when I forego the shaving brush entirely and just slather on the cream with my bare hands.

When I get bored with perfection every day and turn to the other umpteen creams in my on-deck circle, I'll see if any of them work better when lathered in the mug versus in my hand. There's no doubt that using a shaving mug makes for much thicker lather, and much more of it. Whether it actually shaves better is another story for another time.

By the way, I'd like to make a prediction on this day of our Lord June 23rd 2005. The psycho kid on shavemyface.com has just roped about twenty grown men into chipping in 100 bucks each for a custom group shaving brush made by the German firm Shavemac. After much Soviet style debate -- i.e. "Here is only choice. You like? Good." -- the kid got all these hapless lonely hearts all ginned up over a wooden-handled shaving brush with each sap's initials printed on the bottom of the handle, along with the date he officially joined the message board. It's icky, but here's my prediction: every single sap who sends this kid his $100 is going to cry bloody murder when the brushes finally come and they look nothing like the pretty, pretty JPG the kid posted on the site. As I write this, they're probably 2-4 weeks away from getting the brushes, if the kid can actually deliver them at all. Want to watch the fur fly? Go here.

Hey, it beats nascar.