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Today's Shave: Taylor's Avocado shaving cream, Gillette Super Speed, tiny mystery brush, Trumper's lime skin food.

How come when I was shaving with a Mach3 and mediocre shaving cream I could use the same rig all year long without noticing any difference in my shaving, but now that I'm a fancy lad who shaves with safety razors and high-end creams, I need a "winter" shave rig in addition to my usual setup? Good god, has it really come to this?

It being winter and all, the OPEC nation that is my face has slacked off on its oil production, and my shaves have taken a slight but noticeable turn for the worse. The super dry weather's made my skin more sensitive, and I can't put up with my beloved Featherjector (Schick Injector loaded with a modified Feather Pro Super disposable straight razor blade) without beating up my face. All summer I got astounding shaves from this razor, but now I can't even walk past it without flinching. Hell, even an Injector with a standard Schick blade is too much for my skin right now.

No, I'm a DE guy during the winter months, and a mellow-down-easy DE at that -- the late, great Gillette Super Speed (aka "the Milord" when it's gold-plated). Fed with a Swedish Gillette DE blade, the Super Speed's about as aggressive a shave as my skin can take during these dry winter months.

I'm finding that fewer of my favorite shaving creams work as well now as they do the rest of the year. I can't use Trumper's Lime cream or Taylor's Lemon-Lime -- they dry out my skin too much in this weather. The creams that work best for me in this kind of weather are the more moisturizing shaving creams like Cremo Cream, Nancy Boy, and Proraso (oh man is this eucalyptus cream's post-shave cooling effect turbo-charged by the ice-cold winter tap water!)

But one cream stands above the rest when it comes to soothing my dry winter skin and giving me the best chance at a superlative shave in these trying times, and that's Taylor's Avocado shaving cream. I love shaving with this cream all year 'round, but it's really showing its stuff now that it's winter. I never really appreciated what a godsend this weird and wonderful shaving cream is till I tried it today and got a shave that felt like it was from the middle of summer. That's how good my shave was today. Best shave I've had in weeks.

It has to be the avocado oil. Taylor's Avocado is the only cream in this English firm's line that has it, and it feels, lathers, and shaves unlike any of the other Taylor shaving creams. It's smoother, creamier, more like a pudding than a tub of cake icing. I also find a smaller dab of of Avocado makes more lather than a larger dab of any of the other English creams, including Taylor's other scents.

Now, Nancy Boy's shaving cream has avocado oil too, which must be one of the reasons I like it so much. It has that same kind of cushiony, moisturizing shave that works so much better for my skin in dry weather, but the Taylor Avocado is in a league of its own when it comes to leaving my skin feeling moisturized and healthy after a winter shave.

Oh, and I also brought that tiny mystery brush with me to the Y today, so I could see how I liked it in that setting. After a workout, steam, and shower, I placed just the merest of schmears of cream on the tips of that little guy, and ye gods! That midget brush took to the Taylor's Avocado like Brokeback took to Mountain. I got three passes of lather out of this thing and it was still full of cream. I'm going to post a full review of this brush tomorrow -- suffice it to say, this cowboy's in love.

But today, it's all about the Avocado. Get some of this shaving cream, and get it in the cool-man metal tube, because while a tub of shaving cream is better than a plastic tube, a metal tube is better still.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, because I ask myself this question every time I use Taylor's Avocado cream -- why do I ever shave with anything else?