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It's not even the second week of February and I'm already breaking my New Year's resolution to stop making fun of the hapless flailers on the shavegeek forums.

I want to be good and leave the geeks alone, really I do. But 30,000 Shaveblog readers can't be wrong. You people want me to make fun of shavegeeks. You need me to make fun of shavegeeks. You demand that fun be made of guys who think up stuff like "International Shave Day" where they all use the same shaving cream one morning in a show of jeez, I dunno, capacity to ick the rest of us out?

This past week the geeks all lost their shit over Taylor of Old Bond Street, one of the UK's oldest and most well-respected manufacturers of traditional English shaving cream. A longtime shavegeek fave, Taylor makes some of the very best old-school shaving creams available, and they're priced at less than half what most of the other top-shelf English shaving cream brands cost.

But last week, a forum geek thought he saw a piece of the sky falling, and before you could say "lemmings", suddenly there were Rooskies under every doily.

Seems one of these guys was eyeballing his tub of Taylor's Avocado shaving cream and was startled to discover (mistakenly, as it turns out) that skin-friendly avocado oil wasn't listed in the ingredients anymore. Rather than simply ask Taylor about it with the same lack of hesitation these geeks show when demanding the company send them free samples from the UK of a shaving cream that costs ten bucks a tube, he posted his observation on a forum.

A warehouse full of children's fire-retardant Barney jammies couldn't go up in flames faster. Angry hands grabbed torches and pitchforks, and the wholly uninformed accusations began to fly. One geek cried the "new" Avocado doesn't shave as well as the "old" formula! Another geek opined about the beginning of the end for Taylor (a week ago, these same geeks were loving this brand, but now it was DEAD to them).

One particularly pedantic geek began immediately doom-spewing -- if Taylor was changing its formulas, it had to be for the worse, because change is always bad, and then what if all the other English shaving cream brands might change theirs, too?! Panting and out of breath, he finally fell to his knees and shrieked like a girl, his pale, outstretched arms raised above his head as if to both implore God to hear him in this time of need and to shield him from pieces of the heavens which were surely falling toward him at frightening speed.

"WHAT WILL BECOME OF XANAXDU?!!!"

Me, I like getting my facts straight before I smear the reputation of a company whose products have served me fantastically well over the years. So I emailed Barry Klein at Taylor, and he called me shortly thereafter to answer my questions about what, if anything, was going on with Taylor's shaving creams.

Turns out the geeks were all wrong. Taylor didn't remove the avocado oil from its Avocado shaving cream. It's still there. It's just that six months ago, Taylor brought its creams into compliance with new EU regulations that take effect in April, and that entailed making some slight changes to a few of the scented creams. The changes are as follows:

1. Taylor's Avocado still has just as much avocado oil as before (it's listed in the ingredients as persea gratissima) -- the only change to the formula was a different scent. You can tell the new Avocado by its new green-colored label, which, like all of the Taylor creams from now on, is a decal stuck on the tub lids instead of the inked lids the company used to use. The old Avocado tubs have a brown label that's printed right on the lid. The new labeling system was designed to let Taylor use the same generic lid for any of its creams, thus speeding up the company's ability to deliver whatever creams its customers want, instead of running out of inked lids for a certain type of cream and having to wait while new ones are made.

2. Taylor's Lavender is now a slightly different color due to FDA regulations regarding certain coloring agents, but the real difference is in its scent -- Taylor now uses real lavender oil to scent its Lavender shaving cream, replacing the synthetic lavender scent used in the old version.

3. All of the Taylor creams are now allowed to settle for a week after they've been mixed and whipped, and the company now fills its 150-gram tubs with 160 grams of cream and lets them settle for another week, to eliminate the "shrinkage" which has caused complaints in the past when shavegeeks cracked open a new tub of Taylor's to find it seemingly half-full.

In addition, Klein says these extra stages of settling before the creams are shipped to dealers make for a creamier product that doesn't "crystallize" on top and make the cream seem dried-out or hard (Klein advises that any such "dried-out" tub of Taylor's can simply be stirred to restore it to normal consistency, as it's only a thin layer on top of the older creams which had a tendency to crystallize if it sat unused for a long time.

I took the opportunity to ask Klein some questions about Taylor I've always wondered about.

Q: Why do Taylor shaving creams cost less than half what Trumper, Truefitt & Hill, and D. R. Harris creams cost?

A: Even though all four brands have their shaving creams made by the same source, the UK toiletry maker Creightons, the hard plastic tubs are one of the most expensive components, and Taylor buys its plastic tubs in bulk orders of over 100K/year, so it pays less for each tub and can charge less for its creams.

Q: Why does the Avocado cream come in a metal tube while all the other Taylor creams come in plastic tubes?

A: All of Taylor's creams used to come in metal tubes, because that's what the much larger toothpaste industry used at the time. As toothpaste manufacturers began switching to plastic tubes, Taylor phased out the metal tubes as well, but since Avocado has always been its slowest seller, the metal tubes of this particular cream have still been available long after the other creams began shipping in plastic tubes. New tubes of Avocado will be plastic just like the other Taylor creams.

Since all of my tub'n'tubes of Taylor's Avocado and Lavender are the old versions, Klein offered to send me some tubs of the new versions to compare them with. I look forward to getting in the new batch and seeing how the updates to this venerable company's shaving creams fare.

Now I feel bad for making fun of the geeks again. I promised myself I wouldn't. It's a new year, I said to myself. Live and let live, I said to myself. They're people too, I said to myself. People who eat Crunchwrap Supremes --

Okay, New Year's resolution begins.......now!