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Today's Shave: Savon De Marseille oilve oil soap, Vulfix #2234 brush, Gillette Super Speed DE razor.

One of my goals lately has been to get rid of all shower gel in our bathrooms. Beloved Wife started using this expensive (10 bucks!) (of course, when I spend 10 bucks on an eBay razor I never wind up using, that's a prudent purchase) Pre de Provence shower gel when I started this excellent violet-scented Claus Porto soap in the shower after going on a bit of a violet binge earlier this year brought on by the discovery that Trumper's Violet is the best smelling shaving cream in the world.

I usually don't have a problem with whatever Beloved Wife wants to use in the bathroom. But this shower gel stuff is such a scam. It's not as good as soap, it costs much more, and it gets used up much faster.

Also, I'd like if we could keep the bottle count in the shower under 25. Why do we have dozens of bottles of stuff in the shower?! There's just the two of us, and we can't blame the kids because they use that all-purpose Johnson and Johnson baby wash stuff that's a soap, a shampoo, and a bubble bath. So they're only responsible for one bottle.

Just for argument's sake, let's say we each have our own shampoo and conditioner. That's four bottles. Throw in another couple of shampoos, because god knows you can't just have one kind of shampoo in the shower. Okay, that's six bottles. I like using Cetaphil cleanser on my face, so now we're up to seven bottles. Beloved Wife uses Cremo Cream to shave her gams, so eight bottles. That's all we should have. Eight bottles. I could live with eight. But we have 25 bottles. I don't understand it.

A journey of a thousand miles, or 25 bottles, begins with a single step. So I floated a proposal to Beloved Wife -- I'd get rid of the violet bath soap if she'd get rid of the shower gel, and I'd find us a great bath soap we could both agree on. We never had this problem of separate bath soaps back when we were using Dove. We loved Dove. I still love Dove, dammit. But once you get into wetshaving and you start using all these scented shaving creams, it leads to high end cosmetics in general and high end bath soaps in particular.

So I got a bar of Savon De Marseille olive oil soap. A great big hunk of misshapen green soap that's 72 percent olive oil. It was so huge I had to saw it in half to get it down to managable shower size. Ten bucks for a gigantic block of super pure French olive oil seems a better deal than ten bucks for a little bottle of sodium laureth sulfate.

I tried the olive oil soap first and loved it. There's not much scent but what's there is nice. The main reason I like this soap is that it's winter in the Northeast and it's dry as hell, and this soap leaves skin moisturized like no soap I've tried. I can even use it on my face, which I can't with the vast majority of soaps. Best of all, Beloved Wife likes this soap too, and even agreed that it does a better job than the shower gel.

So now we're down to 24 bottles in the shower..

One website that sells this soap said it worked great as a shaving soap. So of course I had to try it. Absolutely had to. Hey, if Heinz told me I could shave with ketchup, I'd try it. You never know. Also, I'm interested to see how many different things other than shaving cream I can shave with. I haven't tried the Seinfeld butter shave yet, but I will.

Lathering up with a brush, the Savon De Marseilles lathered up just like a good hard shaving soap. I got gobs of thick lather with my Vulfix #2234 badger brush, and it smelled really nice, too. I've had terrible luck trying to shave with other bath soaps -- that incredible Claus Ports violet bath soap wouldn't lather worth a damn. I've used hard shaving soaps as bath soaps with great success -- Classic Shaving, Williams, Taylor, and Trumper shaving soaps all make excellent bath soaps. But for some reason, bath soaps don't always make good shaving soaps. The olive oil soap does.

The shave itself was fine. Smooth, close and comfortable. Like a shaving soap, the Marseilles doesn't have quite the cushion and glide of the best shaving creams, but it shaved me just as well as the best hard shaving soaps I've used.

All told, I'm more of a cream guy, but I could easily shave with this stuff if I had to. The crazy thing is, it's actually better than some dedicated shaving soaps I've tried. It's pure, clean, and seems to work well no matter what you try using it for. Can you shampoo with this stuff too? Probably. I'm trying it tomorrow.