.

Today I dryshaved. Let me back up and explain.

The whole point of being a shavegeek is to worship the wetshave -- getting and keeping your face as wet as possible for the entire shave, so the blade rides above your skin and cuts only the whiskers above the skin's surface. This is the whole idea behind lathering with a traditional shaving cream or shaving soap -- the lather keeps a layer of water against your skin, so the razor glides over the surface and doesn't scrape your face up the way blades do with modern gels and foams.

But what if we're all wrong, and it's really the dryshave which works best? That's the idea behind a new shaving cream called Ultra Shave. It's the first shaving prep, in my experience, that recommends you use it on a totally dry face for the best shave.

The other day I got an email from "Modern Gent" at moderngent.com asking me if I was interested in trying Ultra Shave.

Interested in the product? Yes. Interested in trying it? Well...

See, I love the wetshave. It feels good, it works great, and now I finally understand how wrong I was all these years to lean on the dryshave, because it just beats up your face. Even if you can deal with the pain and the scraping, your face winds up looking like leather before long. I see these old guys at the Y dryshaving at the sink in the locker room and I feel like grabbing them by the shoulders and yelling, "Why do you do this to yourself, man?! You could be looking like a young Audrey Hepburn right now, instead of one of those talking trees that throw the apples at Dorothy in 'The Wizard of Oz'!!"

In fact, I am going to grab an old naked man at the Y tomorrow and shout this very thing at him. What's the downside? Only good can come of it, I'm convinced.

Ultra Shave goes in the opposite direction of wetshaving. It's actually more of a lotion than a shaving cream, and the maker is very clear in that you should wash your face, dry it off completely, and then spread some Ultra Shave onto your face and neck, letting it sit for 30 seconds. Then you shave.

And here's the really wacky part -- they tell you not to rinse your razor till you're done with the shave. That's right -- you know that involuntary dunk in the sinkwater you do after each and every swipe of razor across freshly-shorn puss? With Ultra Shave, you don't rinse your blade at all -- you just keep shaving and shaving until you're finished, and then, and only then, are you supposed to clean the whiskers and cream and dead (well, it's dead now) skin off your razor before putting it away.

Why does Ultra Shave want you to do this? In their words:

"Your razor blade will collect the hair as you shave, thanks to the inclusion of stearic acid in the cream. Stearic acid is not an acid at all - it's actually a very high grade soap formulation made from alcohol! Stearic acid enhances the lubricity of Ultra Shave. It forms a thin barrier that makes it almost impossible for the blade to cut you. Stearic acid stays on the surface of your skin and also on the surface of the hair, so that when you cut the hairs off they are held together by this thin film and gathers them on your blade."

So even though I've been getting incredible wetshaves lately with D. R. Harris's Lavender shaving cream, I figured I'd give Ultra Shave a try. While I do think that old-school wetshaving is clearly a better grooming method than the modern paradigm of a triple-bladed vibrator and blue goo in a can, I'm always open to the possibility that someone will come along with a way to shave that's even better.

I shaved with Ultra Shave this morning. I'm going to shave with it tomorrow morning too, and then I'm going to talk about how it went. Because this stuff is very different from anything I've ever used before, and I also emailed "Modern Gent" with some questions I've got about this stuff, because in some ways it's deja vu all over again.

Part II tomorrow.