.

I want to tell you about my friend, Ray Dupont, now that he has announced that he will be soon be leaving us.

I placed my first order from Classic Shaving in 2004, and got a nice note from Ray afterward along the lines of, "It's nice to see someone so high-tech who's interested in traditional shaving!" Ray knew me from my gadget segments on the "Today" Show, and we struck up a friendly email correspondence, consisting mainly of me peppering the poor guy with lots of questions about safety razors, brushes, creams, blades, and all the other factors I was trying to get a handle on as I made my way through the newbie flail.

Ray spent a lot of time patiently explaining how to get the best out of the various wetshaving products he sold (as well as a lot of products he didn't), and his advice was a godsend to me. I didn't know it then, but this was something Ray did, and had done for many years, with scores of young men.

He taught us how to shave.

For the last couple of centuries, one of man's most treasured memories has been the day his father showed him how to use a razor. But my generation was fathered by the generation who first began using the then-new disposable razors and canned foam and wound up dreading the painful shaves they received from this degraded system. And as these disposable commodity items began replacing high quality razors and fine shaving brushes, the tradition of a father teaching his son to shave fell by the wayside.

That's where Ray came in. By establishing Classic Shaving as a place where men could still find quality straight razors, safety razors, shaving brushes, and traditional shaving soaps and creams, as well as the expert advice they needed to get up to speed with all of these things, he gave guys a chance to reclaim shaving as a pleasant, enjoyable ritual that started the day with a close, comfortable shave and a wonderful scent lingering on the skin, the way it had been before the whole thing got dumbed down.

At some point, Ray brought up the idea of my doing a segment on wetshaving. He said it would be a great way to show people that traditional shaving was alive and well, and that the ritual could be much more effective and enjoyable if done properly. And, of course, that cool old-school safety razors, shaving brushes, and barbershop shaves made great holiday gifts..

To be honest, I didn't think NBC would go for it. As excited as I was over the vastly improved shaves I was getting with all this retro gear, I knew my producers wanted me to focus on the cutting edge of high-tech gadgets, not throwback products like safety razors and badger brushes. But Ray kept bringing the idea up, so I pitched it to the show, and to my eternal surprise got the green light in January for a February segment.

Ray was the best kind of resource someone like me could hope for. In addition to his expert advice and his invaluable help in distilling all of the information I wanted to get across down to a five minute segment, he offered to provide "Today" with everything we needed for the segment, and wound up shipping several thousands of dollars worth of straight razors, safety razors, upscale badger brushes, dozens of tubs and tubes of high-end shaving cream and hard shaving soaps to the studio. He even suggested that we feature a live demo of a traditional barbershop straight razor shave, and arranged to have a professional barber come to the studio for the segment.

Ray poured his heart and soul into the segment, and spared no effort to help make sure that those five minutes on national television would be filled with the best shaving products, the most helpful advice, and the most straightforward information about the topic he loved most. He saw that this was a chance to spread the word to an audience of millions that shaving didn't have to be a chore -- that it could actually be a sublime pleasure, as it had been for generations before ours.

I want to bring up something that says everything you need to know about Ray Dupont: at no point did he ever ask for a plug for his business, even though it would have been well within his right to do so, since he was supplying all the props and even bringing in a barber to put on a shaving demo. But in all of our discussions and planning, he made it abundantly clear that the segment's focus should be on wetshaving -- not on him, and not on his business.

Let me tell you something. I've been doing this a long time. I've written about in magazines and featured on TV thousands of products I felt deserved recognition as being a cut above. The really good stuff, as well as the people who design, make, and sell it. And I have never encountered anyone as selfless and modest as Ray Dupont. But I can tell you that he did all the heavy lifting for that segment and deserves all the credit.

Needless to say, the segment was the biggest hit of any that I've done for the show. Ray made a hell of a big wave, and it raised everybody's boat -- manufacturers, his competitors, the whole industry. He did a year's worth of business in the week following the segment, as did every wetshaving retailer I know. For awhile there, vendors were sold out of razors, brushes and creams, as the manufacturers across the pond had to ramp up production to meet the sudden demand. And sales have continued to grow, as interest and awareness of traditional wetshaving has flowered all over the world. This is all his doing.

When it came time to shave this morning, I couldn't help but think of where so much of what I know about shaving (as well as the sheer tonnage of stuff I've bought from Classic Shaving) came from. So in tribute to a friend, I used a Ray-approved rig -- a Merkur Vision DE razor, a cake of his new Lilac-scented shaving soap, a Dovo travel brush, and to finish things off, some Taylor's Shaving Shop aftershave balm. And of course, I got a fantastic shave. But then I always do when I follow his advice.

Through his tireless efforts to promote awareness of traditional shaving products and practices, by the peerless example he has set both personally as well as with Classic Shaving, and by the many ways Ray has enriched the lives of so many of us with his kindness, intelligence, generosity, and unwavering professionalism, he is leaving the bar far higher than where he found it. Ray Dupont can justly look upon the worldwide wetshaving boom of 2005 as just one of the many triumphs in the life of an extraordinary man.

I've met very few like him, and I will miss him terribly.

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?

Nancy Boy shaving cream, Gillette Super Speed DE razor, tiny shaving brush.

Shavegeeks tend to romanticize the past, and I'm as guilty of it as anyone. I talk about safety razors like they're some pure manifestation of The Greatest Generation, used by JFK, Cary Grant, and Lee Marvin, back when men were men and shaved like men, even though the women probably had legs that felt more like Brokeback Mountain than smooth'n'silky.

But the more I delve into shaving's past, the more I see that the times, they've never really a'changed much. Witness this 1948 magazine advertisement for the then-new Schick/Eversharp Injector safety razor, and its absurd claim that each and every blade was "stroned!"

Stroned?

That is to say, stropped and honed, like a straight razor's edge -- honed on a whetstone, and stropped on a hanging leather strop. Serious he-men wetshavers who use a straight razor have to periodically hone their razors on a stone, and then before each and every shave, they swipe the blade to and fro on a leather strop to keep the edge keen. But safety razor blades?

I believe Schick was honing all of their Injector blades -- all razor blades are "honed" in one way or another, whether it's done with a stone or a laser beam. But am I really supposed to believe Schick was stropping each and every Injector blade with "30 ft. of leather" any more than I'm supposed to believe that the Mach3 Power's "micro-pulses" make the shave closer?

How stroned do they think I am?

Meanwhile, today I shaved with the smallest shaving brush I've ever tried. I've been mulling the possibility that size actually does matter when it comes to shaving brushes, except that bigger isn't better -- smaller is. As long as the bristles are high quality -- "best" grade badger or better -- so the brush can hold a decent amount of water, a small brush should be able to outperform a larger brush.

I've certainly gravitated toward the smaller brushes, for their tighter control. When I use the big-ass brushes favored by many shavegeeks, I make a mess of myself and the entire sink -- lather up my nose, in my sideburns, on my chest, all over the sink. With a smaller brush like the Vulfix #2234, I can lather up just as well as with a big brush, and do it much more neatly, and I don't waste nearly as much lather.

So I've been trying to find the smallest possible brush that still does the job and does it well, and I think I've found it. I want to use it for a few more days before I say more, but so far, I love this little guy to death.

Back in grade school I had a teacher who asked us to write out the step-by-step directions for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and then the teacher followed each set of instructions literally, to the letter. As in, "take a piece of bread" meant he ripped apart a sealed bag of bread to get a piece of a slice, because the instructions didn't spell out untwisting the bread twisty and reaching into the open bag to to remove a slice of bread. "Spread jelly on one piece of bread" meant dumping out the entire jar of Smucker's Concord Grape, though I argued, then as now, that it could also mean doling out a single molecule of jelly.

The lesson, of course, was that it's really, really hard to accurately and properly describe how to do something so that someone with no idea how to do what you're telling them to do can follow your directions and pull it off.

I bring this up because back in February I wrote an article about wetshaving that became a live segment on the Today Show, and I recently printed out this article and sent it to my brother, along with a vintage Schick Injector, some new Schick blades, and a tub of Nancy Boy shaving cream, after he'd complained about his Mach3/Lab Series brushless cream shave.

I tried really hard to make the step-by-step instructions for wetshaving with a safety razor, a shaving brush, and traditional English-style shaving cream as easy to grok as possible, but as always, there's writin' and there's doin'.

Two shaves into his Injector, my brother complained he couldn't get his neck and mustache area shaved as close as with the Mach3. Now, anyone who's tried moving from a modern pivoting multi-blade razor to an old-school safety razor knows it takes a week or so, at the very least, to get as good a shave as you can with a Mach3, and then after that the shaves get progressively better and better. But it does take time, and practice.

It also takes following directions. And if you read my article, you read things like:

"Remove your brush from the water, hold it upside down until water stops pouring out of it, and then you’re ready to apply the cream." (except that the lather will then be too thin and runny -- you should really give the brush a flick or two to get the water/cream ratio just right)

"Mainly, that means slower, more careful strokes, and guiding the razor’s head over your skin WITHOUT PRESSING DOWN. Let me say that again. WITHOUT PRESSING DOWN. AT ALL." (except that you kinda sorta do need to press down a little bit, if you want a close shave)

In other words, shave exactly like I wrote you should and you wind up with a ripped off chunk of bread with an entire jar of Smuckers dumped on it.

I had to tell me brother that he could go ahead and apply a bit of pressure with his Injector, and that he should try shorter, repeated strokes under his nose, and diagonal passes under his chin. In other words, he should try the little tips and tricks I picked up myself after I wrote the article. I'm sure there will be more.

At this point, it's hard to remember what it was like the first time I brought a Merkur HD up to my Musgo Real slathered face, after years of shaving with the Mach3 and the Sensor, and nicking the sweet bejesus out of my chin, upper lip, cheek, neck, et al. You get some wetshaving under your belt and you forget how different this way of shaving is from the typical modern guy routine.

So I'm trying to rewind back to my first few safety razor shaves, so I can help my brother get through his first week till he dials it in on his own. It's also a good excuse to email him my latest Google Video finds.

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.

Before I begin today's entry, an introduction of a new feature here at Shaveblog -- the dreaded SOTD, or Shave Of The Day. You know, when a guy lists the products he shaved with that day. Ewww, right? I used to see these "SOTD" posts on the shavegeek forums and cringe, but then I started keeping a blog about shaving, which is even lamer. So, in response to reader requests, the inaugural SOTD --

Taylor's Rose shaving cream, Vulfix #2234 brush, Gillette Super Speed DE razor, Trumper's Coral Skin Food.

Over Thanksgiving I bonded with my dad over shaving, which was nice. Then my brother piped in and started complaining about his shaves -- even with the face-numbing Lab Series "Maximum Comfort" shaving cream I'd turned him on to years ago before I knew better, he still hates shaving with a Mach3. Hates the shave, hates the high cost. Hates it all.

So I promised him I'd put together a custom rig when we got home from Thanksgiving and ship it off to him. I'd given my dad a vintage Gillette Super Speed, a Vulfix #377 badger brush, and a tube of Trumper's Violet shaving cream, but I went in a different direction with my brother. He's got a much heavier beard than mine and my dad's, plus he's not really the kind of guy who's going to loll around in the bathroom getting ready in the morning.

I'd already sent him a Vulfix brush eons ago, so he had that base covered. For the rest of the rig, I sent him the most no-brainer, quick and easy, thoroughly effective and totally excellent wetshaving newbie setup I could think of:

Nancy Boy shaving cream. I've gushed over this insanely great, reasonably priced, great smelling, super moisturizing shaving cream before. Suffice it to say, the Nancy Boy's become one of my favorite shaving creams. It's half the price of comparable English creams like Trumper, and where else are you going to find a gay-themed shaving cream that's "tested on boyfriends, not animals"?

Schick Injector razor. The easiest safety razor of them all, yet perfect for heavier beards due to the thicker blade. I sent my brother one of my best Injectors, a 1940's bakelite-handled job that's clean as a whistle. I wish I'd known how much easier Injectors are to get up to speed with when you're moving over from a modern razor like the Mach3 -- it took me a few weeks to get comfortable with my first Merkur DE, but my very first shave with an Injector was a world-beater.

Schick Injector blades. Amazon's always had the lowest price online for these excellent blades at $4.25 per 7-pack, but tonight I checked Drugstore.com and they've just dropped their price to $3.84. Free shipping on both sites if you buy enough blades to last you for awhile, which only makes sense.

My brother got the package yesterday, along with a printout of my original article on wetshaving I wrote to accompany my Today Show segment earlier this year, so tomorrow will be his first-ever old-school wetshave. I don't want to turn my brother into a shavegeek, but I'd love it if this rig gives him a better shave and turns the ritual into something pleasant instead of a drag every morning.

I'm currently in the process of unlearning all the misguided dogma I picked up when I first started checking out the shavegeek forums in search of a better shave. And by far the biggest dogma pile has to do with shaving brushes. More specifically, big-ass shaving brushes. As in, you need a big-ass shaving brush, or else don't even bother.

Me, I've come full circle back to a small, inexpensive badger brush, not terribly different than what I started out with years ago when I had no idea safety razors were even around anymore, or that the best shaving creams in the world came from England and not from the men's cosmetics counter at Nordstom's.

The brush then was a small $50 Art Of Shaving "fine" badger brush. The brush now is a $60 Vulfix #2234 "super" badger brush. I think they even share the same bristle knot size (the width of the bundle of badger hair at the base of the handle) -- 22mm, which is way too small for serious shavegeeks to take seriously. They go for the 26mm knots, or even better, the 30mm "hogs" you almost have to hoist with two hands, they're so goddamned big and beautiful. "Chubby Chasers" takes on a whole new meaning.

I bought into this dogma and picked up some really big brushes -- a pair of Vulfix #377s, big-ass brushes with 26mm knots, and I also tried even bigger Vulfixes like the #40 and #41, which have 30mm knots. The thinking is that the bigger the knot, the more badger hair, and the more badger hair, the more water the brush will hold, and the more water the brush will hold, the more lather it can whip up, and the more lather it can whip up, the better. Even if you don't really need enough lather to fill a punch bowl. Bigger is better, and more expensive, which also = better.

I went down that road and got nowhere. Maybe some guys need a giant brush -- I really don't. I've tried a lot of different sized brushes from a lot of different brands, and I've settled on the Vulfix #2234 as the best overall brush I've tried. It's big enough to absorb lots of water and then build crazy amounts of lather from just a small dollup of the Taylor, Trumper, or Nancy Boy shaving creams I like to use. And it's only $60, which is chump change compared to what most of the geeks spend on their dream date brushes.

I've gone back and forth with brushes, and it's the #2234 in Super badger I keep coming back to as my main brush. I also like the size of the slightly larger #2235, but mine is the more expensive Silvertip version, and I prefer the Super badger bristle. So I find myself using the Super badger #2234s whenever I want to enjoy the best possible shaving experience, which is every time I shave.

I think it's the giant shaving brushes they use that hold so many shavegeeks back from improving their shaving. Because these big-ass brushes are actually harder to get consistently good lather with than a smaller brush like my #2234. I find the really big brushes an impediment to a great shave, actually, which is the opposite of what I was told so many times when I first stepped into all this. Now I've got a bunch of big-ass brushes sitting around unused, while this little, moderately priced Vulfix delivers the goods better than any of them.

From the day I bought my first shaving brush, "silvertip" grade badger bristles have always been held up as the ne plus ultra, the top of the line, the best of the best. Silvertip brushes -- so named for their Johnny Winteresque white hairs, which only turn black at the very bottom where the bristles come out of the handle -- are by far the most expensive of all shaving brushes, so they're the shavegeek's holy grail. You're just not a man till you buy a silvertip shaving brush, or better yet, three or four of them.

The story goes that when Chinese badger hunters swing their poleaxes and pop go the weasels, the tufts of bristle that make up the white band around the badger's neck are considered the best grade of bristle for making shaving brushes, because, well, I don't really know. Nobody has ever been able to explain why the white bristles are better than the darker hair on the rest of the badger, except that they're said to be stiffer. Or softer. Or stiffer and softer. Depends on which ad copy you read.

I started out with an Art Of Shaving "Pure" badger brush I bought for $40 years ago, then I traded up to a $50 AOS brush in "Fine" badger. Movin' on up, as they say. Hey, it was ten dollars better, right? And I jumped up a whole badger grade! Yipeee!

Then I upgraded further to brushes with "Best" grade badger hair. It's one step down from silvertip, but I find it much softer on my face and and more luxurious feeling. The Vulfix brushes I favor call this grade of hair "Super", while Simpson calls it "Best", and Kent and Shavemac actually call it "Silvertip" even though it's clearly not.

But I'm not immune to the shavegeek dogma. I got a genuine silvertip Vulfix earlier this year, and I was really excited about it. I used it exclusively for months, ignoring the Vulfix Super brushes I'd been using and loving. Even though the silvertip brush felt harder and more prickly against my skin, I told myself that this was what a superior shaving brush was supposed to feel like, and tried my best to convince myself that I liked it better than my Vulfix Supers.

This weekend, I finally gave up. I have to face facts -- I just don't like silvertip after all. It's a fine brush and lathers like nobody's business, but I far prefer my Best/Super grade brushes from Vulfix, Edwin-Jagger, and Dovo/Merkur. They feel better against my face, they lather just as well (maybe even a little better, truth be told), and I like the fact that they don't cost an arm and a leg. I'll put my $90 Vulfix #377 up against any silvertip brush at any price. There are bigger brushes, and more expensive brushes, but there are no better brushes than the Vulfix #377 in Super badger.

I realize this is a personal preference thing. I'm sure some guys like that prickly feeling. I don't. If silvertip lathered better, or easier, or did anything else that improved the shave, I'd try to overlook the prickly sensation. But it doesn't. It's pretty to look at, I'll give it that. And it is a stiffer bristle, so guys who like using hard shave soap may find it works better at whipping up lather off a cake of soap than a softer brush. Me, I use a $12 Omega boar bristle brush with hard shave soap, and it works like a charm. And doesn't cost $300.

It's a funny thing about silver and overheated hobbyist geeks. Back when I was reviewing high-end audio gear, silver audio cables were the big thing. Heinously expensive, hard to come by, but you just weren't an audiophile unless you had at least one run of silver cable in your system.

And I fell for it hook, line and sinker, boy. Cabled my entire rig with silver, and marveled at all the increased detail and "speed" I could finally hear, now that the silver was letting the signal get through just that much faster, due to its lower resistance at microwave frequencies.

Of course, I was wrong. These days I'm back using copper cables -- Belden, in fact, as decidedly and calculatedly as unaudiophile as it gets -- and my system sounds better than it ever did.

Now, far be it for me to call guys who want silvertip brushes chumps. These brushes are rare, expensive, top of the line, and much more collectible than a best badger brush. But from a purely pragmatic standpoint, they don't improve the lather or the shave. They feel different, but it's up to you to decide whether this difference means better or just different. To me, it's just different, and it's a difference I don't particularly care for.

Today I got my Vulfix #377 out of its box where it's been sitting for months. Man, do I love this brush! Especially now that I've had a chance to live with silvertip for awhile.

If there's ever to be a true and lasting peace in the Middle East, we need bold new ideas. And speaking from Mecca today, Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad put forth an idea that was plenty bold and pretty darned new:

Move Israel to Europe.

Now, as I see it, the real issue here is razor blades. Israel's got a factory in Nazareth that makes those excellent "no-name" el-cheapo Platinums that dssokhey on eBay's been selling boxes of 100 for $15. That's nearly two years' worth of blades for the price of a Majid Rezazadeh CD.

I've used these blades and they're excellent. They're actually unlabeled Personnas, but I find them to be of higher quality than the Personna DE blades sold in the US under their own name as well as many drugstore brands. American Safety Razor also has a blade factory in Mexico, so it's possible the Israelis are a different blade entirely than the Personnas we get here. Either way, they rock.

So what happens if Iran gets its way and Israel gets relocated to Germany or Austria, as President Ahmadinejad suggested? Germany's already got DE blade factories cranking out Merkur and Wilkinson blades by the millions. And just down the street in Sweden, they're making those amazing European Gillette DE blades that make a mockery of the Russian-made Gillettes sold in the US.

I've been shaving with the Swedes in my vintage Gillette Super Speed DE for weeks now, and I've been hugely impressed. They shave as close as the crazy-sharp Japanese Feather Platinum blades, yet they're smoother and more forgiving. I don't know how they do it but they do.

So yesterday I was putting together an old-school wetshaving rig for my brother, who'd complained about his shaving when I saw him over Thanksgiving, and I spied a box of 100 "no-name" Israeli blades I'd bought on eBay. I already told my brother I'd be sending him a vintage Injector and some Nancy Boy shaving cream, but I thought maybe I should send him a Super Speed DE and a box of the Israeli blades instead. Hip him to a cool razor and enough blades to last him till 2008.

I hadn't shaved with an Israeli blade in my DE for quite some time, so I thought I'd swap out the 55-cent Swede in my Super Speed for one of these 15-cent "no-names". I've always gotten excellent shaves with the Israelis, but I wanted to make sure they worked well in the Super Speed, which I hadn't tried them in yet.

The first shave was a shocker. After lathering up with Nancy Boy cream and a Vulfix #2235 badger brush, I got a shave every bit as close and smooth as I do with the Swedes. I kept faceturbating all day long, rubbing my face and neck and marvelling at how close a shave I got from that 15-cent blade. I even told my pal Gordon about how the Israeli blade shaved as close as a Swede in my Gillette DE. "What if the Super Speed swamps differences between blades," I pondered, secretly hoping it was true. I'd love to get shaves like this from 15-cent blades instead of having to order the Swedes from across the pond.

The thing is, though, today's shave wasn't quite as good. It was close, but not Swede-close. It's a shave I could live with, but why live with compromise? Maybe Mahmoud's right -- maybe you need to take a hard line and eject that which should not be there. "OUT OF MY RAZOR, ZIONIST BLADE!" I shouted, hurling little gobs of lather at the medicine cabinet mirror like they were rocks. "GABBA IS GREAT! GABBA GABBA HEY!"

So anyway, kudos to Ahmadinejad for thinking outside the box and all, but I don't think his idea's going to fly. I mean, just look at that scraggly beard. Clearly, the man doesn't care about shaving. And the rest of the world is supposed to trust him with the keys to the blade factory?

Say what you will about the man's realpolitik, but I say, what is just and what is not? When dssokhey can't get any more cheap boxes of 100 no-name blades and has to shutter his eBay shop because ASR's factory in Israel now makes schwarma skewers, we will have simply traded one shande for another. And that, as my pal Whitney would say, is the greatest shande of all.

Mobile shaving is my new ya-ya. It started with shaving at the gym, then spread to shaving in an airplane bathroom right before landing after a 14-hour flight to Tokyo, and now that I've caught my first shave in an airport lounge shower, I have a simple question:

Where have airport lounge showers been all my life?!

Why don't people talk about taking showers in the "president's club" or "officer's club" or whatever your paricular airline calls its VIP (Virtually Infinite Pretzels for Vaguely Irritated Potentates) lounge?

I finally joined one of these a few years ago, but I've never really used these lounges for anything beyond popping peanuts into my pie-hole and using the free WiFi, and sometimes changing clothes in the bathrooms, which you can't really do in the ones strewn throughout the terminals without, like Seinfeld, having to throw away whatever clothing happens to touch the floor.

But I never showered in an airport lounge. I didn't even know they had showers in these things, till a well-traveled friend told me about it. It's such a great idea -- a shower at the airport! You've got your clothes and Dopp kit right there in your luggage. It couldn't be more perfect. Okay, free bacon would be more perfect. I get sick of bagels and apples. Would it kill them to put out some bacon? Even just jerky would be huge.

So Sunday, when I arrived at Newark after a long shoot Saturday night and no sleep since Friday, I decided to recharge with a nice hot shower and a shave before getting my car and driving home. You can't just waltz into the men's room in the lounge and grab a shower -- you ask the person at the reception desk, who then leads you over to the special shower bathroom and hands you a couple of towels (decent, kind of bleachy smelling WHICH IS GOOD CONSIDERING).

Showered, toweled, and went in for the kill. I had my Dopp kit with me, of course, so I caught a gentleman's shave with all the trimmings -- Gillette Super Speed loaded with a Swedish DE blade, Merkur silvertip travel brush, Taylor's Shaving Shop cream. The only downside was the light-sensor activated faucet, which would only turn on if I waved my hand under the the faucet, and then I'd only get a few seconds of water per wave. So that sucked, but only a little. Kept things interesting, in a way. Shave and wave, shave and wave.

Let me tell you something, man and boy: leaving an airport right after deplaning from a long flight and leaving an airport after catching a hot shower and a nice shave are not variations on a theme. As long as I'm flying alone and time permits, I'm going to do this every chance I get from now on. Even though I hadn't slept in 2 days, I felt like a million bucks rolling my suitcase toward the parking garage, and for once, I didn't come home after a long trip looking like something the cat dragged in.

Finally, that $350/year starts making sense. I've spent that much on meals that didn't lift my spirits as much as that shower and shave did. Now I'm even thinking about driving over on a day I don't to fly anywhere, just for a pop-in.

Shavegeeks of the world, move over. Your time in the sun is through. A new age is upon us, and it belongs to the rootbeergeeks.

Ah, root beer. It makes perfect sense. What's more important than root beer? Even those little root beer "barrel" candies are awesome. The only hard candy that tastes like what it's supposed to be. They put it the time to make it right, and why? Because root beer commands that kind of respect.

I grew up on the great root beers of the mighty Midwest -- Hires (we even collected the stamps and got the beach towel with the Hires bear on it), Frostie, Canfield's, Dad's, Faygo (to be fair, we drank as much of their Red as we did their root beer), and of course, A&W -- no family car trip across the states of Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Milwaukee was complete without a stop or seventeen at an A&W's roadside restaurant (back in the days when they sold Papa Burgers, Mama Burgers, Teen Burgers, and Baby Burgers) (some hamstorians claim A&W served "Grandpa Burgers" but I honestly don't recall ever seeing them on the menu).

Nowadays I drink Dr. Brown's root beer, or especially IBC if I can find it. Even store brand root beer is pretty damned good. I've had 'em all -- Val-U King, President's Choice, Taint's, Quali-T, Food Club, My-T-Fine, Bi-Lo, Hi-Q, Mr. Fizz, Our Compliments, Vons, Piggly Wiggly, Shur Fine, and Family Dollar. Colas are never handled well by store brands, but root beers always come through in the clutch.

What root beer, you ask? What does root beer have to do with shaving? Well --

This.

I hate business travel so I tend to eat too much and obsess about little things like making sure I've got milk in the room to go with the bathroom Mr. Coffee joe because seriously, I will hang myself from the sprinkler system spigot over the bed before I put that fake powdered "creamer" shit in my coffee.

Another thing I do to offset the fact that I'm not doing what I'd always rather be doing which is sitting on my couch at home watching ReplayTV'd "King of the Hill" and "Simpsons" with my kids is I obsess about my travel toiletry kit.

Nevermind that I usually forget to pack oh, say, underwear, or even one time I actually forgot to pack a suit when we were traveling to an out-of-town wedding. They divorced later, due no doubt to the curse I put on the entire ceremony by wearing a dress shirt (quickly bought at shop near the hotel, never worn again) under a sweater.

(To be fair, if some guy'd come to my wedding wearing a sweater over a dress shirt, I'd forever remember him as "that cheap schmuck who came to our wedding in a sweater." For the record, I could have bought an inexpensive dress shirt for $19 to go under that sweater, but I dropped $85 on a Joseph Abboud dress shirt, because I felt somehow that even though only the collar would show, the extra effort I put the gesture by spending needlessly would assuage the bad mojo. Nope. They split up within a year. My fault.)

It's because my focus is on my travel kit. That's where the soul of man lives -- in his toiletry bag. His deodorant, his nail clippers, his hair goop. Most importantly, his shaving cream, and his razor. Why the bag itself matters to me I can't say, but it does, so I've always tried to find really cool ones like this one.

My latest eBay score was this really excellent dark brown "Mellow Touch" cowhide leather Dopp Kit from the 1960's, never used and still with the original tags. I say Dopp not in the generic sense but in the literal -- this bag was actually made by Dopp, the company owned by Charles Doppelt, a leather goods designer from Germany who came to the US in the early 1900s. It's said that the Dopp kit was really designed by Doppelt's nephew Jerome, but either way, it was named the Dopp Kit, and issued to US soldiers during WWII. Doppelt eventually sold his company to Samsonite in the 1970's.

This Dopp Kit is so cool I can't stand it. I carried around a $20 soft nylon Tumi travel kit for years, and never thought much about it. It was black, nylon, waterproof, soft, zippered. It held stuff. Fit in my suitcase. The Dopp Kit, on the other hand, is a thing of beauty. It smells as good as it looks, with that old leathery smell you don't really get from leather goods anymore.

What I've got shaving-wise in my Dopp Kit right now as I sit in this hotel room away from my family:

Gillette Super Speed DE razor
5-pack (well, 4-pack now) of Swedish Gillette DE blades
Dovo travel brush inna tube
Taylor's Shaving Shop shaving cream
Trumper's Lime Skin Food

I find shaving like a pampered Little Lord Fauntelroy helps mitigate being on the road away from my family. I could just throw a few Bic disposable razors into my Dopp Kit and use hotel soap to lather up with like I used to, but I used to do a lot of stupid things I don't do anymore. I used to go to Super Cuts and ask the fattest stylist to lay her hand on my scalp and cut the hair that went past her sausage fingers. I called it the "Chia" cut. I don't do this anymore.

So today, in a strange hotel room in a strange city on a strange gig, I got an amazing shave, and I got to ogle my cool-man Dopp Kit from the 60's, and it all made me feel a little bit better about the whole thing. I though maybe the Super Speed would be a let-down after a few days shaving with the incredible Featherjector, but I'll be damned if this timid little Gillette (loaded, it must be said, with the excellent Swedish blade) didn't shave me just as well, and maybe weller. I got a super close shave and without the tingle I like from the Featherjector but probably shouldn't like because it means I drilled too deep.

And lo and behold -- tonight room service brought my turkey club along with a big box full of what I call chocolate turtles but what Marie McGhee calls Bumblebees.

Has to be the Dopp Kit.

I've been on such a nice roll lately with my shaves. All the tumblers seem to fall into place, and I lucked into a combo of products that took the routine to a whole other level.

Discovering how insanely great the old 1940's Gillette Super Speed safety razors are -- and how these non-adjustable, seemingly timid DEs actually shave consistently more closely and comfortably than any of the adjustable Gillettes and Merkurs I've got -- was a revelation that mystifies and delights me.

Then ace men's cosmetic hunter Chris Fisher turned me onto the justly-heralded Nancy Boy shaving cream, which has become one of my very favorite shaving products. This peppermint/lavender/rosemary-scented cream with aloe and avocado oil lathers like nobody's business, shaves as well as any of the expensive English creams, smells wonderful, and leaves my skin smooth and moisturized. Even if it didn't cost only $15 a tub -- half what Trumper charges me for a tub of their amazing Violet shaving cream -- the Nancy Boy would be one of my favorites.

Of course now that I'm on such a nic roll, that means it's time to shake things up. So for the last few days I revisited the Featherjector, the marriage of an old bakelite-handled Schick/Eversharp Injector and a cut-down Feather Pro Super disposable straught razor blade.

I got a closer-than-close shave today with no issues, just like I did this summer. I'm looking forward to seeing if maybe the Nancy Boy cream lets me get away with shaving every day with the Featherjectot. Because as good as the Swedich Gillette blades shave in a Super Speed, nothing shaves as ungoldy close as the Featherjector.