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Ever since I started using Nancy Boy's incredible shaving cream, I've become addicted to the brand's signature scent of lavender, peppermint, and rosemary. It's soothing and relaxing and energizing and stimulating and sensuous all at the same time, and it got me to thinking: why not enjoy this incredible scent in a hard shaving soap as well?

As it happens, Nancy Boy makes a bath soap in their signature scent, but as with most bath soaps, it doesn't really work as well as a shaving soap as it does in the shower. So I decided to make my own faux Nancy Boy, or as I call it, Nancy Boychik hard shaving soap.

Luckily for the intrepid DIY soaper, it's dead easy to make your high-end shaving soap in whatever custom scent you want, using a cake of Classic Shaving's hard shaving soap. It's made with virgin olive oil, glycerin, and bentonite clay, and it's the best shaving soap I've used to date. I love Classic's scented shaving soaps like Violet and Lilac, but you can also buy this soap in an unscented version, which is perfect for custom-scenting.

For my Nancy Boychik shaving soap, I bought little bottles of lavender, peppermint, and rosemary essential oils from Body Time, a great web site the Fisher King turned me onto for this kind of stuff. Body Time's got all kinds of high quality essential oils and fragrance oils on hand, and they're fairly cheap -- my three bottles came to less than $30, and I got enough to make dozens of soaps with plenty left over.

The nice thing about Classic Shaving's soap is you can melt it down in a microwave till it's liquid, and then mix in your essential oils before letting it cool off and harden back into shaving soap. I put a regular size cake of Classic soap in a glass coffee mug and put it in the microwave for 10 seconds at a time till it was fully melted -- took two zappings. Then I tapped 7 drops each of the lavender, peppermint, and rosemary essential oils into the melted soap, stirred it all up, and let the mug cool off at room temp overnight. It was hard again in a matter of minutes, but I wasn't going to shave till morning anyway, so what the hey. Couldn't hurt to let it cool overnight.

When I went to shave this morning I stuck my nose in the mug and was greeted with a nice big blast of Nancy Boy signature scent! Not a reasonable facsimile thereof, not a Rich Little impersonation of Johnny Carson that kinda sorta sounds like Johnny, but the real deal. I'm telling you, it smelled exactly like Nancy Boy shaving cream, exactly like their Signature Aeromatics (i.e. potpourri for guys), exactly like all the other lavpepmary scented Nancy Boy products I've bought to pleasure my schnozzola. Exactly.

And let me take a moment to pay fealty to Eric and Jack at Nancy Boy, for what they have come up with may just be the greatest scent combination of all time. Lavender alone is nice. Lavender and peppermint, that's some good stuff right there. But adding rosemary to the mix was the master stroke. John, Paul, George, and Pete would've gone down in rock history somewhere on the foodchain between the Kinks and Nelson, but adding Ringo put them at the top forever. So it is with rosemary. Rosemary is Ringo. Taken on its own, and maybe backed with Joe Walsh and Sheila E., it's okay but nothing special. Mix it with lavender and peppermint and you've got Sgt. Pepper.

Now, I've made a couple of custom-scented shaving soaps with Classic's unscented cakes and Body Time scent oils before, and they lathered like kings and gave me titanic shaves. The voilet-scented soap I made, in particular, is still a favorite I catch a shave with every now and then. But this Nancy Boychik shaving soap is in a different class entirely.

The scent was incredible. The lather was thick, rich, lubricating, cushiony -- all the good things you want in a shaving lather. Shaving with this stuff after a few days of shaving with the Latherking was a real wake-up call -- there's good lather, and there's gooood lather, and there's a wide enough gulf between these two points that I need to stop dicking around and just stick with the goooood stuff, because life's short and I want all my shaves to be like today's (1940's Gillette Super Speed razor, Swedish Gillette DE blade, Simpson Wee Scot brush). It was perfect. Closer than it's been in weeks, yet my skin felt great afterward and all day long.

Plus, as an added bonus, when I rinsed with cold water after the shave, I got this incredible cooling effect on my skin from, I guess, all that peppermint and rosemary essential oil. There must be less of these oils in Nancy Boy's shaving cream, because I never get this kind of cooling effect when I shave with it. My Nancy Boychik soap has a stronger scent than Nancy Boy's cream, as befits a hillbilly DIY overdone kitchen project. I'm sure Eric and Jack tweaked the ratio in their shaving cream just so, until it gave up enough scent to please the sniffer but stayed gentle on the skin. My custom soap packs an amateur whallop, but I like it that way. It reminds me a lot of the cooling effect I get from Proraso shaving cream. Some shavegeeks don't care for this cool-down but man, I love it. I wish I got it after all my shaves. Even if you don't need it to soothe any burn, it just feels great anyway.

So now I've got the best of both worlds. The scent of Nancy Boy, and the lather of Classic Shaving's hard soap. I'm mainly a shaving cream guy, but I do like to haul out a hard soap every now and then for a change of pace and the extra close shave a good hard soap can give you. I can see using soaps more often now that I've seen what Nancy Boychik can do. It's my favorite hard soap yet.

And it looks like I'm going to need all the help I can get, because, God forgive me, I picked up a Gillette Fusion today and I'm going to try it in the morning.

Why, Lord, why?