.

My face doesn't look like this today.

It looks a bit beat-up. Because it is a bit beat-up. I have red bumps on the base of my neck around my Adam's apple, and the surface of the skin under my chin is noticeably more rough and bruised than it's been since, oh, I first tried a Mach3 Power.

When will I ever learn?

Listen to me and listen good: I will never, ever buy Gillette's new mutli-blade shaving system unless two of the three Wee Scotsmen (more about this gang of shavegeek elites later) tells me it's the bomb first. Screw this Lewis and Clark shit. One shave with the new Fusion 5-blade razor on Friday and I'm still nursing my wounds on Monday.

Some say shaving with an old-school safety razor like a DE or an Injector treats your skin so nicely that it conditions it over time so it's less able to stand up to the kind of harsh, scraping shave a three, four, and (sigh, now a) five blade razor subjects your face to. Whether that's true or not, I can't say, but I do know I get beat up every time I try one of these @%#$ multi-blade razors now.

So today I took it easy on my face. Just a light shave, nothing too heavy, and certainly not the kind of tushy shave I usually aim for. Some Nancy Boy cream and a new Swedish blade in my 1940s Super Speed DE, and the lightest possible touch. Even half-trying, I got a better shave than I did with the Fusion.

I can already tell it's going to take a week for my face to heal from the Fusion tryout. I'd skip shaving till I heal but my beard isn't one of those cool beards that comes in looking chic and downtown. It looks like Emmitt Kelly Jr.

Meanwhile, I'm looking at this 1946 Gillette Super Speed DE I use every morning, next to the 2006 Gillette Fusion:



One was precision tooled of solid metal, still looks brand new, shaves like a dream SIXTY YEARS LATER. The other is made of plastic, and nobody will want one in a few years, when either of two scenarios plays out:

1. (less likely) The Fusion flops in the marketplace as men around the globe suddenly all get hit on the head with a Krazy Kat brick and come to their senses in time to figure out the Fusion's no better than the Mach3, and the less-fair sex has its own James Frey-style righteous indignation-a-thon, complete with the male Oprah (Jon Stewart?) leading the charge against Gillette's tearful execs, forcing them to admit on live TV that they made up all that stuff about spending tens of millions on R&D, and that they knew all along that it's been downhill ever since the Sensor Excel, but what the hell were they supposed to do, admit that they couldn't improve on a twin-blade system and simply continue to sell trillions of Sensor blades every year to satisfied users?

2. (more likely) The reason nobody wants a Fusion anymore is because the Fusion Nitro, Fusion Turbo, Fusion Aggro, Fusion Gummo, Fusion Eggo, and Powered Fusion Eggo, have superceded it.

Meanwhile, I have got to find out how the Asian Prince gets his hair to do that.

I tried Gillette's new 5-blade Fusion razor over the weekend. Not the battery powered version -- that's for saps. No, I just tried the regular Fusion. Five blades on the shaving side, and an extra blade on the back for trimming around the sideburns/goatee/pubic mound or anywhere else five blades can't quite spelunk.

I actually snuck out to CVS last Thursday to get a Fusion on the first day they put them on the floor, lying to Beloved Wife that I needed to go run a few errands, because I couldn't admit to her that I was getting in my car and driving to the drugstore solely to buy the new Gillette shaving system. I can stand in front of this woman in boxers and black socks without shame, but I couldn't tell her where I was going or what I was going to do when I got there.

It wasn't any better standing in line to pay for it. I would've felt less embarrassed holding a tube of strawberry K-Y and a copy of Barely Beagle in full view. I felt like a sucker, and if anybody I knew had come into the store, I would've dropped the package and pretended I was there to buy almost anything else in the store. Seriously, how can anybody at Gillette say the words "five blades" with a straight face? Three blades was silly. Four was ridiculous. Five is where I feel pretty confident that, as Hunter Thompson put it, the wave finally broke and rolled back.

As a card-carrying shavegeek who loves vintage razors, I'd love to dis the Fusion's fake macho futuro/Nike/Terminator looks, but as Gillette chose a blue/orange motif -- Bears colors -- I cannot. The plasti-chrome is plenty cheezy, but the colors are sacred. Sweetness. Danimal. Fridge. Ming the Merciless. Iron Mike. So we won't spend any time making fun of the looks of this razor. We will let them be and move on.

The thing that bothers me most about the Fusion's design isn't the fact that it's got five blades. It's that the "micro-fins" that precede the blades as you shave, supposedly raising your whiskers and setting them up for the cut, take up much more space in front of the blade array than on any other razor I've ever seen. The Fusion's micro-fin zone is twice as long as the Mach3's, even though its shaving area is nearly the same size, owing to the closer grouping of the Fusion's blades versus the Mach3's.

Why does the Fusion need such a long patch of micro-fins in front of the blades? Well, because if it had as short a patch as the Mach3, you'd slice your face open. The extra-long micro-fin zone is required to keep the 5-blade array flat on your face so it won't nick your skin. The more blades Gillette puts on a razor, the longer the safety bar in front of the blades has to be to keep the blades angle from becoming too aggressive.

Do you see where this is going? When they come out with six, or seven, or maybe ten blades (laugh now; report back in a few years), they'll have to lengthen the landing strip in front of the blades even more, till the shaving head becomes nearly as big as your face. The Fusion's shaving surface is too long for the average face, and makes the Mach3 seem compact and nimble by comparison.

In fact, the Fusion's head is so large, it's even harder to shave under your nose or square off your sideburns than it is with the Mach3. So Gillette put a single blade on the back of the Fusion, just for these tasks. Some shavegeeks have even hoped this single-edge blade might actually deliver a better shave than the front of the razor, and convince billions to suddenly throw down their multi-blade razors en masse and join the DE-volution.

Keep dreaming, boys. The single blade on the back of the Fusion is mostly useless at anything but trimming your sideburns. I tried shaving half my face with it to see how it performed, and it's just not up to it. The shave was mediocre, harsh, and not nearly as good as using the front of the razor.

As for the Fusion's 5-blade shave, I'll give it this -- it's surprisingly comfortable, even a bit moreso than the Mach3's shave. After tearing my face up with the free 4-blade Quattro Schick sent me awhile back, I was leery of shaving with a razor with yet another blade added to the mix. But the Fusion is actually a very comfortable razor to shave with -- razor drag is practically nil, and even against the grain the Fusion simply glides across the face as if it were hovering. Of course, my prep was better than the typical scenario this razor's going to find itself in -- I took a hot shower beforehand and used Nancy Boy shaving cream and a Simpson Wee Scot badger brush -- but even so, the Fusion was a bit more comfortable to shave with than the Mach3.

That's the good news. The bad news is, the quality of the shave just wasn't any better than a Mach3's. Rubbing my fingers against the grain, I could still feel stubble, despite three full passes -- with-grain, against-grain, and then a second against-grain because I still felt stubble all over. Yet even this extra against-grain pass didn't leave my skin as glass-smooth as Gillette's 66 years-older Super Speed DE safety razor does every morning. What I got was the typical Mach3 shave -- quick, easy, requiring no thought, technique, or concentration, and looking good enough for the office even though if you rub your face you'll still feel some stubble.

Like the Mach3, the Fusion's a deceptively comfortable razor. During the shave it hardly felt like I was shaving at all. But afterward, my skin felt raw for hours, and still felt pretty tender at the end of the day. I remember feeling this way every day back when I was using the Mach3, which is why I tried so many different shaving creams and after-shave lotions to help "fix" the problem, which immediately went away when I started using a DE.

All that said, I don't think the Fusion sucks. It's no better than a Mach3, but it's no worse, either. I don't care for these razors, but they don't suck. They just don't shave nearly as closely or as irritation-free as a safety razor.

Finally, there's the matter of cost. Much has been made about the price of the Fusion's blade cartridges -- $3.50 apiece on average, or 50 cents more per blade than the Mach3's. I don't know and won't be finding out how long a Fusion cartridge lasts before the shaves start to go south, but I was only ever able to get about three or four good shaves from a Mach3 catridge. That's a buck a shave! (Could I have ever been that stupid?) (well, there were those parachute pants
back in the 80s..)

I remember back in '98 when the Mach3 hit the market. Guys (me included) went apeshit for it, because it really did shave and feel different than any razor that had come before it. Millions of men felt it really was much better than what they were using at the time. I mean, the freakin' New Yorker even did a profile on it written by Mr. Tipping Point himself, Malcolm Gladwell, who treated the new razor like the Next Big Thing that it actually was. The Mach3 devoured the market in no time flat. 99 percent of the guys I know who shave, shave with a Mach3.

I don't think the Fusion's going to be the same kind of hit. Besides the fact that there's a world of difference between the tail-end of the go-go Clinton years and the slow-motion depression this country's in today, the simple fact is the Fusion just doesn't shave any better or differently than its predecessor. It's a bit more comfortable during the shave, but that's it -- the shave's no closer, the razor burn's no lesser, and the blades are even more expensive. It's hard for me to imagine anyone trying a Fusion and feeling it's better than, or even different enough to elicit interest in switching from, the Mach3.

I'm not one of those deluded shavegeeks who thinks the world's male population is just one DE shave away from a mass exodus away from multi-blade razors. It's never going to happen, for a myriad of reasons, first and foremost being that it takes some time spent learning the proper technique before you start getting amazing shaves from a safety razor. With the Mach3 and Fusion, your first shave is as good as it's ever going to get. It may not be "the best a man can get", but it's pretty good right off the bat and stays that way, and for most men that's good enough.

It'll be interesting to see what happens in the next few months. The ad blitz during the Super Bowl will be concussive, and then the apes will descend upon the fruit. You can't count Gillette's marketing expertise out, but this time, I wonder if they can really convince a planet of men to change razors when the new one shaves just like the old one but costs more.

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?

Slick lather at last! Slick lather at last! Thank God Almighty, slick lather at last!

A great man once said that. Me, this morning, when I finally got the kind of lube-happy goods I'd been led to believe this Latherking hot lather machine could deliver.

Turns out you do need to add some sort of slick-me-up to the tap water and shaving cream after all, despite what I've been told by a few professional barbers who swear by the Latherking. They told me all I had to do was add a couple of fingers of old-school shaving cream from a tub to 8 ounces of water, stir it till it dissolved, and then the Latherking would reward me with gobs of shaveworthy lather, as hot as the day is long.

But the lather I got with that simple recipe wasn't slick at all. I got lousy shaves that way. On a lube scale of 1 to 10, the lather scored a 3.

Smashing an Etch-a-Sketch open and smearing the aluminum powder on my face scores a 4.

So I took Paul Sanka's advice (PS is the guy I got the Latherking from) and added a tablespoon of Lucky Tiger Shaving Lotion to the mix I already had in the tank -- two fingers of Taylor's Shaving Shop cream and 8 ounces of water (full tank).

Sanka sent along a bottle of the Lucky Tiger when he sent me the Latherking, nice guy that he is. I ignored it, of course -- shaving lotion? What the hell? But Lucky Tiger's been around since the '30s, even if this lotion is a new product in their "New School Organics" (!) line, so I figured it was worth a shot.

Well. It worked like a charm. I'm not going to take back everything I said about the Latherking -- the "hot" lather only stays hot for 2 seconds once you smear it on your puss, so it should more truthfully be called a "momentarily hot lather machine" -- but I will say this: feed it what it needs and the Latherking can burp up some excellent, extremely slick lather. That's a fact. Water and cream alone won't do it. You need to add something else to the mix like this Lucky Tiger lotion. But when you do, you will get (fleetingly) hot lather that shaves very nearly as well as what you can get with a top-shelf cream and a brush.

This morning I just stumbled out of the shower, pressed the Latherking's button, smeared the lather on my face and went to town. This time, my 1940's Gillette Super Speed razor didn't skip and stutter on my skin at all -- it glided just as smoothly as it does when I lather with my Simpson Wee Scot brush. And the shave itself was excellent. No irritation, no problems, just the usual great Super Speed shave -- except I didn't use a brush, it took half the time, and I got to press a button and hear a motor whine, which is always nice.

Okay, so I got this thing to work well. Will I keep using it? Nope. I satisfied my curiosity about the Latherking, and now I can empty it, strip it down, clean it like new, and pack it up for the next wide-eyed shavegeek who's always wanted to play with one of these professional barbershop hot lather machines.

See, I like using a brush to much to give it up and switch over to the Latherking. I like what a good shaving brush does in terms of making great lather, but even more than that, I like the way it feels -- the way it wakes up my face, scrubs and exfoliates my skin, lifts my whiskers, and okay fine, looks cool sitting on the counter with a head full of lather. Casey Jones wins this round.

I'll tell you what, though. Next time I get a haircut or a barbershop shave, I'm going to ask what they feed their Latherking. If it's just cream and water, that lather's not touching my skin before they shave me. They better go fetch an Etch-a-Sketch.

I admit it. The Latherking has not been filling my life with glee. The more I use this thing, the more I think it's only appropriate for a professional barbershop, and totally useless for an at-home shavegeek scenario.

The problem is the lather. For all its vaunted ability to deliver instant hot lather anytime you press its button, the Latherking's lather just isn't as good as what you get when you use a shaving brush to make lather with a good tub-style shaving cream. And let's be brutally honest here -- that "hot lather" is only hot for a few seconds when you pat it on your skin, and then it plunges to room temp. So what you're buying, essentially, is two seconds of hot lather. I was kind of hoping for, oh, maybe some heat for the duration of the shave, but I hoped wrong.

The previous owner of this beast reads Shaveblog and suggested I add a tablespoon of Lucky Tiger Shave Lotion, a bottle of which he'd included along with the Latherking when he sent it to me. He said it would add mo' lube to the lather, so I mixed the Lucky Tiger in with a tank of water and two fingers of Taylor's Shaving Shop cream, and let it marinate overnight.

I'll be honest with you. My face took kind of a beating from the shave I caught with the Latherking the other day. I got a close shave, but even as I was shaving I knew I'd be paying for it later -- the blade skipped on my skin, which always means less-than-optimal-lube which itself means I'm not going to look or feel so hot for the next 24-48 hrs.

So today I took a break from the Latherking and went and caught a post-workout shave at the gym. I even spent double the usual time in the steam room, because I was listening to the latest Ricky Gervais podcast on my iPod in there and stayed for the whole thing (apologies to anyone who walked in and found a lone, drenched, semi-naked man giggling like an idiot to himself in an otherwise silent steam room).

I shaved immediately after the steam with my usual gym rig -- 1940s Gillette Super Speed DE razor, Swedish Gillette blade, Simpson Wee Scot shaving brush, Nancy Boy shaving cream, and Trumper Lime Skin Food -- and got the kind of alpha shave that makes all of this prissy nonsense worthwile. I don't need @%#$ hot lather. I need to just stick to this rig and NEVER DEVIATE FROM IT, EVER.

Like that'll happen.

By the way, I want to clear something up about the 1940's Super Speed razor. Ever since I wrote about this amazing vintage Gillette, my favorite by far of all the old Gillette DEs, I've seen guys snapping up Super Speeds and then complaining that they don't shave worth a damn. The problem isn't the Super Speed -- the problem is you guys got the wrong razor.

This is a 1940s Gillette Super Speed, the one I recommend:



And here's the later version from the '50s and '60s which some of you shavegeeks are scoring off eBay:




You can tell the later Super Speeds by their larger, flared TTO (twist to open) knobs. They look like bell-bottom pants, perhaps in a nod to the prevailing fashion of the day. The original '40s Super Speed's knob is only slightly wider than the rest of the shaft and doesn't flare out at all, as God intended pants to be.

These two versions look similar, but they shave very differently, and the later Super Speeds aren't even in the same league as the originals. I've got quite a few of these '50s and '60s Super Speeds, in all kinds of color schemes -- red, blue, and black knobs (indicating how aggressive the blade exposure is), black shaft with a silver knob, silver shaft with a silver knob, you name it. None of them is manufactured to the same standard as the original '40s Super Speeds, and none of them shaves nearly as closely and comfortably. Some of these later Super Speeds are decent enough razors, but if you really want the magic, hunt down the first version.

So I've been dicking around with this Cambell Latherking hot lather machine, trying to get it to deliver the cream of my dreams.

On the surface, this mechanized beast couldn't be simpler -- you add water and a few fingers of old-school shaving cream (i.e. the stuff in the tub, not the pressurized can), press the button, and the motor churns it up and forces it out a heated spout to make nice, hot lather, as much as you want, any time you want.

But in practice, this thing clearly needs some dialing in. Maybe it's because it wasn't designed to be used with a water/old-school shaving cream mix in the first place. No, Campbell meant for the Latherking to be used with the company's own liquid soap solution:




God knows what's in this stuff, and I haven't been able to find anyone who's ever liked using this stuff in his Latherking, either. Everyone I know who's got one of these contraptions says to forget Campbell's own soap solution and use a water/cream mix instead.

The only problem is, I tried that, and it didn't work so hot. Two fingers of Taylor's Rose shaving cream to eight ounces of tap water made for a pretty runny lather. The good news is that this machine is so simple, adding cream or water to thicken or thin the mix makes an immediate difference in the lather that squirts out of the spout. A third finger of Taylor's Rose thickened the hot lather nicely, but then it was too thick -- after awhile it wouldn't come out at all, and then I had to add more water to thin the mix a bit so it would flow properly. I ended up dumping the whole mess in the sink.

Next up was Trumper's Violet shaving cream, one of my favorites. I always need a smidgen more Trumper's than I do other creams to make the same amount of lather with a brush in the usual shavegeek manner, so this time I added three fingers of Trumper's to the water tank right off the bat, and this worked out much better than the Taylor's cream. The resulting lather was thick, rich, and nicely larval. Very Stay-Puff Marshmallow Man in consistency. But when I applied it to my face, the lather dissipated almost immediately and collapsed into a thin film on my skin. No good. I upped and lowed the water/cream ratio a few times, got nowhere, and dumped the whole mess into the sink.

Nancy Boy! Yes! I've been loving this new-school cream lately, so it was the natural choice to try next. A little Nancy Boy goes a long way so I started with two fingers to a full tank of water and -- and -- nothing. Leaned on that button and the motor did whine a mighty whine but no cream did emit. Added some more water and got a little bit of thick cream, but then nothing. Dumped whole mess etc.

The gentleman I got this Latherking from had suggested I use a recipe of old-school shaving cream, water, glycerin (you get it from a drugstore), and a tablespoon of Lucky Tiger liquid shaving cream, a bottle of which he thoughtfully sent along with the Latherking.

But all the barbers I've talked to who have these machines say they just use shaving cream and water, and get professional grade hot lather all day long, day in and day out. I really don't want to mess with a complex recipe every time I fill this damn thing. I just want to top her off with tap water and a few fingers of cream and go.

Clearly, the Latherking wanted a cream a bit thinner in consistency than the Taylor, Trumper, and Nancy Boy creams I tried in it. The only shaving cream I have on hand that fits the bill is an older tub of Art Of Shaving Lavender, which has got to be three years old if it's a day. It's been kept tightly sealed, though, and it looks fine (lathers with a brush as well as it ever did, too). I mixed a couple of fingers of AOS into the water tank and tried it.

I had lather! Lots o' lather. Lots and lots and lots o' lather, in fact. If I'd kept leaning on the button all day, I could've filled my bathroom with hot lavender-scented lather. I don't like this cream as much as the other three I tried, but that's with a brush -- in the Latherking, the AOS cream worked far, far better than the Taylor. Trumper, and Nancy Boy creams.

Still, I think I have to work on this some more. I got the thing humming, definitely. I can come back to it hours later, a day later, and as soon as I press the button, thick, perfect hot lather comes churning out of the spout. It's thick and rich and plenty hot.

But when I put it on my face -- either slathered around or just patted into place -- I only feel heat for a second or two before the cream plunges to room temp and then it's no different than lather from a brush.

Well, it is different, because it's not as good. It's thinner, not nearly as slick, and doesn't cushion the razor anywhere near what it does when I make lather with this AOS cream with a shaving brush. Not even close.

The shave I got with this AOS hot lather was very close, but not as comfortable as what I can get from this cream with a brush. The razor skipped a fair amount on my skin, and afterward my face felt a bit raw, which is always a sign that I didn't have the right amount of lube between the blade and my puss.

The longer I wetshave, the more I realize that all of this rigmarole -- the choosing of the badger brush, the right amount of cream, the right amount of water to keep in the brush when you go to make lather, all of these little calibrations -- boils down to creating a slick barrier between the blade and you. That's it. When everything's right, the blade glides across my face like it's not even cutting, but then afterward I feel my skin and it's like I'm four years old.

Despite the marketing jizz of the big-name gels and foams, you never get this kind of righteous glide with any of this crap. What you get is a razor skipping on your skin, just like it did with the Latherking lather. It's better than nothing, but it's not as good as brush-made lather.

I'm going to try adding some Lucky Tiger to the mix and see if that slicks things up appreciably. I really don't want to shave with this lather anymore the way it is now. It's not nearly good enough to get a proper shave with. No wonder the back of my neck is always red and sore every time my barber "cleans up" my neck with a Dovo Shavette disposable blade straight razor after the haircut. He just lays some Latherking lather right on the back of my neck, dry, and proceeds to shave it with a naked blade. This is not optimal. No sir. I realize he can't get my neck wet with hot water because I'm sitting there with my shirt on under the smock, but next time I get a haircut I'm bring a tube of Cremo Cream and asking him to try that instead of the Latherking. Even dry, I bet the Cremo would lube better than hot lather.

I've got more work to do. This machine is cool, and I'm having a ball playing with it, but I do want to get respectable, usable lather out of it before I pack it back up and unload it onto some other Sisyphean soul.

I've wanted a hot lather machine ever since I was a kid. My dad had a Sunbeam (or a Schick, I can't remember which) latherizer that accepted a can of shaving cream, and when you pressed the button on the top, out came hot lather. It was a miracle of 1970s technology. I can still remember him pumping me out a handful of hot lather -- the smell of the lime foam haunts me to this day -- and thinking that a hot lather machine was just about the coolest mantraption you could possibly imagine.

Well, now I finally have my own hot lather machine. A used Campbell Latherking with the charcoal finish, in cherry condition. The Cadillac of lather machines. The workhorse found in every upscale barbershop and quite a few downscale ones as well. The king of lathers and the lather of kings. The Latherking.

This electro-mechanical beast has been around since 1939, and the really old ones were all-chrome, which must have been bitchin'. Mine is a more recent version, though it could be twenty years old for all I know. You can still buy these things new, though Classic Shaving, from whose website I purloined the pic, has quit carrying the Latherking due to "an unacceptably high incidence of defective Campbell LatherKing machines".

That may be so, but I've seen these machines in service at lots of barbershops including the Truefitt & Hill shop at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, and just a few weeks ago when I was there, the Truefitt barbers were all extolling the virtues of the Latherking and urging me to pick one up for myself. They use Truefitt's shaving cream in their Latherking for all the straight razor shaves performed in their barbershop, and last summer when I got one there, and they say they've never had a problem with it.

My Latherking looks almost brand new -- I don't think it's seen any time in a professional barbershop, because every Latherking I've ever seen in the trenches, including the one I saw at the barbershop (different place from the one I went to a few weeks ago where the old Italian barber told me to shave with a dulled Bic and Noxzema -- by the way, nice job, Brettmeister General, actually giving this crazy rig a go -- you're a better man than I am, Charlie Shavegeek) today when I went in for a "trim" (i.e. a full-blown haircut, which is what I get every time I ask for "just a trim" no matter what barber I go to -- is it a pride thing with these guys? That if they don't chop a noticeable amount of mane they're somehow not doing their job?) are caked with crud and perma-dried lather scum. My Latherking is most likely the equivalent of the barely-scratched vintage guitar that's never actually been gigged with, just barre-chorded in a succession of bedrooms and basements.

The Latherking is an ingenious device. You pour a mixture of water and your favorite shaving cream in the reservoir tank, and then when you press the button, an electric motor spins a paddle and whips the water/cream solution into a thick lather which then gets pumped through a heated tunnel before emerging as a hot white larval mound into your hand. You keep the Latherking plugged in all the time, and it rewards you with instant hot and fresh lather on demand.

Sure, it's overkill for one guy shaving at home in his boxer shorts. The Latherking was designed for continuous duty in a barbershop, with three or four barbers all going to the well for hot lather all day long. It's built for gangbanging, not a quickie. But overkill is what being a shavegeek's all about. You don't need a Latherking any more than you need a hundred-dollar brush. As long as you wet your face with hot water for a few minutes, whether in the shower or at the sink before a shave, your whiskers are as soft and shave-ready as they're ever going to get. Hot lather's about hedonism, not improvement. It just feels good on your puss. That's it. If it takes a motor-driven machine to make this happen, then all the better.

Right out of the box, the Latherking reminded me of every vintage guitar amp and Leslie rotating organ speaker I ever bought and then spent the rest of the day cleaning up and restoring to good working order. It's an old, simple, crude contraption that smells old in the best possible way, like an old Lionel train set. I stripped it apart, cleaned everything with a toothbrush and warm water, and put it all back together looking good as new. Then I went about figuring out what to feed this thing.

Campbell, the maker of the Latherking, sells a liquid soap solution you're supposed to use to make lather, but everyone who owns a Latherking says it sucks. Apparently, you can get much better lather by using a mixture of traditional English-type shaving cream and water -- the unofficial recipe calls for 2 teaspoons of cream mixed with 8 ounces of water. Everyone's got their own special formula, with some guys adding a few drops of glycerin for extra lube, and other guys mixing a traditional cream with a liquid shaving solution like Lucky Tiger. The underrated Portuguese shaving cream Musgo Real is also said to be spectacular when pumped out of a Latherking, though some say you shouldn't use creams with lanolin because it gums up the works. I love all the do this/don't do this lore that surrounds the Latherking. I know I'm going to have fun with a vintage fixerup if it has this kind of hazy, unfocused lore. There's no PDF manual to download from a web site, because there's no web site. Just some low-rez scans of Xeroxed diagrams, passed on from geek to geek. Beautiful.

I decided to try keeping it simple the first time out. Two tsps of Trumper's Violet to eight ounces of water, stirred until it was a purplish concotion and then fill 'er up. They say you need to leave the Latherking plugged in for at least an hour for the heating element to hit its stride, so I let the machine warm up for an hour and then gave it a push.

Nothing.

Then a spurt of thin lather, and then nothing again, despite the motor's constant whine. I held the button down and the Latherking made a racket, but not hot lather. Or rather, it didn't make any hot lather I would consider shaving with. What came out of the spout, in spasmodic fashion, was warm, watery spew. So I lathered in the usual way, with Nancy Boy shaving cream and my vintage silvertip Simpson's Wee Scot brush, and got a fine, though fully manual shave.

I'll futz with the Latherking some more tomorrow. I don't know why I'm so intrigued by this thing, because I love using a good brush to make the lather, especially this vintage Wee Scot. But the Latherking has been my Moby Dick for some time now, and I need to harpoon its fat motorized ass before I'm done with all this.

So I'm about to get in the shower so I can wash up and then catch a shave afterward with my new Latherking hot lather machine when the power goes out. And stays out. Beloved Wife and the kids are upstairs and light shines through the windows so everyone's fine, but I'm in the downstairs bathroom, my bathroom, where all my crap is in the medicine cabinet, where there's no window and it's very dark.

Beloved Wife brings me a flashlight, but stoically I wave her off. If the grid goes down, Lord, so be it.

I shower, towel off, and the power's still off when I fill the sink with hot water for my shave. Truth be told it's not pitch black dark, just dark. I can sort of see my way around, but just barely. The mirror is useless, but I can see the razor and the brush and cream if I look down and squint.

I was going to try my new Latherking for the first time, but the Grid thought otherwise, so the hot lather spewer will have to wait. I lathered up with my Simpson Wee Scot brush and some Nancy Boy shaving cream and brought my old Gillette Super Speed DE razor to my face, slowly, because I was shaving blind.

Actually, it went surprisingly well. Amazingly well, I have to say. I guess if you do this long enough, you don't really need to watch yourself doing it. Back in the disposable Good News! razor and Gillette Foamy days I shaved in the shower for years without one of those piece-o'-crap "fogless" (please) mirrors you get for 15 clams from Sharper Image that SUCK which is why I ditched it and just shaved without one thereafter. So it can be done. I just never did it with a safety razor before today.

Okay, so I got one nick. Fine. So I rubbed an alum block on my nick in the dark, too. Lots of dark doings this morning. I felt like Daredevil, or Blind Lemon Jefferson. He played a small woman's guitar, aka "parlor" guitar, that sat high up on his whale-like belly when he played. Now, playing guitar blind? Forget it. But shaving went okay.

Tomorrow I'll have some stuff to say about the Latherking. I dicked around with it once the power came on again, and it's a pretty interesting piece of machinery. More tomorrow.

I've been waiting for the Homer-eats-the-fugu-sushi "Simpsons" for seemingly forever, just for this scene.

Of all the Simpsons shaving gags over the years -- Homer shaving his back, shaving his face while high on medicinal marijuana and spurting geysers of rainbow-colored blood from his nicks, Patty's transvestite fiance getting outed when he's discovered shaving before the wedding -- Homer teaching Bart to shave exactly the way I first learned how to shave is my all-time favorite.

This season Ricky Gervais is supposed to get his own guest episode. If this episode also features a shaving gag of some sort, I will know that intelligent design is for real.

I'm getting emails about these so-called "new school" shaving creams I've been championing lately, like Nancy Boy and Truefitt & Hill's Ultimate Comfort. Guys want to know if their favorite mall cosmetic counter crap is as good as these two new shaving creams, so they can breathe a sigh of relief and feel better about having paid 30 clams for a plastic tube of some over-cologned designer spew that's honestly worse than if you just lathered up with a bar of Dove and shaved with that.

Listen to me. Most "new" shaving creams marketed to young guys and sold at mall men's cosmetic counters suck. Even the ones that seem like they've been around for a long time and hence have some legitimacy, like Kiehl's. I've tried every shaving cream Kiehl's makes, and never got a decent shave from any of them. I don't mean to slag the brand -- Kiehl's makes some products I like and use regularly, like their legendary lip balm. But their shaving products aren't very good at all, at least not on my skin.

I've tried samples of Jack Black, Zirh, American Crew, Clinique, Polo, you name it, if Nordtrom's men's cosmetics counter had samples of it, I've shaved with it. And each one was worse than the last. I've got nothing against any of these companies, and like with Kiehl's, I like some of their other products. But shaving is literally where the rubber meets the road, and you can't get away with half-assing it when it comes to laying down an effective layer of lube to protect the skin while a scary-sharp blade peels a few layers away.

No, what I mean by "new school" shaving creams are creams which clearly come from the traditional English mold of a relatively simple, glycerin-based formula, but which take it a step further and improve on certain areas of performance where even the best of the old-school shaving creams could be better.

Like slickness, for one. Yesterday I treated myself to a shave with Trumper's Violet shaving cream, one of my favorite old-school English creams. I've been shaving with this stuff for quite awhile now, and I've never gotten a bad shave with it -- it shaves like it smells, which is great.

But after several weeks of shaving with new school creams from Nancy Boy and Truefitt, I found myself noticing things about the Trumper I hadn't before. Like the way it took a lot more cream and water, and time, for my brush to whip up the right kind of lather for a good shave (smooth, creamy, no bubbles, nothing running down my neck and onto my chest). With the new school creams, they're practically exploding with lather halfway out of the tub, and whether I use a little bit of water or a lot of it, whether I swirl the brush around and around to make lather in my other hand or just make the lather directly on my face, the Nancy Boy and Truefitt Ultimate Comfort creams always make perfect lather that shaves like nobody's business. They're much easier to get perfect lather with, every time.

Another thing I noticed was that shaving with the Trumper cream left a dry path of face behind the blade as it swept across my skin, which meant that shaving over that area without first getting it wet and lathered again meant I was basically dryshaving. With the new school creams, especially Nancy Boy's, my skin stays slick and lubricated no matter how many passes I make with the razor. I noticed this same phenomenon with Cremo Cream's excellent brushless shaving cream -- unlike the old school creams, the new breed keep your skin slick and protected even after you've shaved it. This really does wonders in terms of eliminating razor burn and other irritation.

But it's after a shave that I notice the biggest difference between the traditional shaving creams like the Trumper's, and new school creams like Nancy Boy and Truefitt's Ultimate Comfort. The best English creams are already much more skin-friendly than your typical drugstore foams and gels (and especially that over-cologned designer garbage at the mall), but the new school creams take it much further. Both Nancy Boy and the new Truefitt cream have more glycerin in their formulas, as well as skin-healing niceties like aloe and avocado oil, allantoin, cucumber extract (one of the main ingredients in D. R. Harris's amazing Aftershave Milk), Vitamin E, and none of the artificial colorants or perfumes that can irritate your skin. When I shave with these new school creams (or with the equally fantastic Italian shaving cream Proraso) , my face feels great, and without a hint of the tightness and dryness I get from most of the traditional English shaving creams (Taylor's Avocado being the sole exception -- in many ways, it's kind of halfway between the two camps).

Does this mean I'm through with English shaving creams? Not on your life -- I love my favorite Trumper and Taylor creams, and will keep shaving with them whenever I want a shot of their particular flava. Trumper's Violet, especially, I need to shave with at least once a week, just for the scent alone.

I always crack up when I see shavegeeks discover a new shaving product that works really well and suddenly they've got to get rid of everything they've been using. "Get this crap OUTTA here!" They spent hundreds of dollars buying up all kinds of upper-echelon product but now they've got to toss it to the curb, and all because of some chocolate/marshmallow/Teddy Graham scented shave stick they fell in love with. And then a week later when they've sobered up they place another order with Classic Shaving to buy all the stuff they just tossed. Unless you live in a sheath that's just a bit wider than your own body circumference, it's okay to keep stuff, I feel.

Some traditionalist shavegeeks grumble about these new school creams, feeling threatened, I suppose, by anything that isn't 200 years old and printed in Ye Olde Taverne Sign font. Hey, I'm down with the geeks if we're talking about the "young guy" shaving products at the mall. But the new school creams like Nancy Boy, Cremo Cream, and Truefitt & Hill's Ultimate Comfort are a whole other animal, and a genuine improvement over what came before. My skin's never been so happy since I started shaving with a safety razor.

One of the weirder corollaries of starting down the wetshaving path is the newbie's olfactory "coming out". Straight, conservative, repressed Midwestern men to whom Old Spice is about the wackiest scent they'd ever consider wearing suddenly find themselves rutting naked through fields of lavender and violet like horny satyrs. The simple act of switching from a drugstore shaving gel to a lavender, sandalwood, lime, or rose-scented English shaving cream becomes a tipping point that opens up a whole new obsession centered around surrounding yourself with excellent smells.

My own holy shit moment was Trumper's Violet shaving cream. I'd been using several old-school creams scented with sandalwood and limes -- nice, safe, traditional manly-man scents -- but when I first cracked open a tub of the Violet, my knees buckled and a little lace hankie materialized in my hand somehow so I could raise it to my forehead and exclaim, "Oh, Rhett!"

I'd hated floral scents my whole life, but all of a sudden, I loved them. Couldn't get enough of them -- Taylor's Lavender and Rose shaving creams, Trumper's almighty Violet, hell, now I even use Classic Shaving's Lilac scented shaving soap, which I'm pretty sure qualifies you as being bi-curious just for shaving with it. Violet's one thing, but lilac?! And I fathered children? Doesn't add up.

Now I'm cookoo for cocoa puffs over Nancy Boy's house "signature" scent of lavender, peppermint, and rosemary. I started using their amazing shaving cream scented with this trio, and now I'm addicted. I've always liked lavender, and it's Beloved Wife's favorite scent, but the addition of peppermint and rosemary somehow transforms a classically calming and sedate scent into an amazingly addictive aroma that somehow manages to relax and energize at the same time.

Lavender alone is fine. Mint alone is nice. Rosemary is good with chicken. But put the three together, and forget it -- just give me a paper bag and clear my schedule, because I've got huffing to do. Oh, but golf is an acceptable obsession, you say? Fine, must be nice living in your world. Leave me to my huffing, squares.

The Nancy Boy shaving cream led to their other lavpepmary-scented products -- the shampoo, the bath soap, the hand soap, the cooling aftershave gel, especially (I'll have more to say about this later). All of these products rock so hard they've become staples, something no single brand has ever been able to sway me into. I've never liked a brand across the board enough to buy into it for all the various toiletry tasks at hand, but Nancy Boy's killing me lately, and its house scent is a big part of it.

But now I fear I've crossed a threshold I may never be able to scurry back over. Along with my last order, Nancy Boy threw in a bag of their signature-scented Signature Aeromatics. It's a blend of crushed lavender, peppermint, and rosemary. You're supposed to put it in a bowl and set it out so it'll scent your room and look nice.

Yes, that's right. Go on, say it. You know you want to. Please, just get it out in the open so we can deal with it already, dammit. Okay fine, I'll say it:

It's POTPOURRI.

Happy now? It's potpourri. Is there anything in the world more disgusting than potpourri? Just saying the word give me the willies. In my mind I smell some godawful blend of dried orange peel, tea rose, patchouli, skunk moss, pine cones, bird shit, and whatever else is raked up from the yard and warmed over little bitty candles in numerous terrible scenarios I've suffered through over the years. I once stopped seeing a girl because she liked keeping bowls of the stuff around her apartment. I just couldn't do it. I could accept the Nagel prints and the schizophrenia, but I drew the line at potpourri.

But this was Nancy Boy, and I could smell that lavender, peppermint, and rosemary right through the sealed plastic bag. So I told myself it was "Signature Aeromatics", not potpourri, the same way I told myself that my Batman, Aquaman, Big Jim, and Stretch Armstrong dolls weren't dolls at all but "action figures", and I tore into it.

I split the bag's contents between two bowls (Beloved Wife: "Um, I use those bowls for serving..") and put one in my office and the other in our bedroom. And let me tell you something, man and boy -- our home will never be without strategically placed bowls of this stuff around the house again.

Just two bowls, one upstairs and one downstairs, and now our whole house smells great. And the rooms with the bowls smell insanely great. I stick my face in the bowl in our bedroom at night before we go to bed and take a nice, deep huff, and I swear my neck muscles spontaneously liquefy. This is exactly how I want the air around me at all times to smell. Lavender to calm me, peppermint to stimulate me, and rosemary to remind me of those best-ever lamb chops we ate in Paris where they served them with match-lit sprigs of rosemary stuck into the bird and literally smoking like incense, leaving trails of smoke from the kitchen to our table.

I don't really know where the hell I can go from here. "Brokeback Mountain" desktop wallpaper? Using iSquint so I can watch Isaac Mizrahi on my iPod during my pedicure?

Due to popular demand, I've restored the full and sacred text of Shaveblog, from the very first post to the one you're reading now. Blogger seems to be working fine again, knock on woodgrain, so I'm going to see if it'll stay ship-shape if I leave the full and sacred text on the main page. If it balks at re-publishing the full and sacred text every time I add a new entry like it was for awhile there, I'll have to go back to just posting the last two weeks of sacred text, and then figure out what went wrong with the Blogger template when I started messing around with it in the first place so that now it won't archive old posts properly. Anyhoo, for now, the full and sacred text is back online. Enjoy the freedom its truth sets you free to.

Question: why do some guys feel the need to towel themselves off after a shower at the gym by standing at a sink in the bathroom while they watch themselves? Especially as they reach down to dry their junk? I don't get this at all.

It's natural and healthy to be ashamed of your body. I myself towel off right at the showers, with a purposefully dull and lifeless expression focused somewhere about a foot in front of me, careful not to look at anyone else. So why, every time I'm standing at a sink and shaving after a workout, does some guy come over and begin toweling off in the next mirror, and I mean he goes to town, especially down there. A guy today actually came over to the next sink over from where I was enjoying a nice shave and began doing (I kid you not) pelvic thrusts as he toweled off.

Am I just too repressed to enjoy the sensation of scratchy, over-bleached towel against fresh-cleaned man-root? I don't know about you, but my underwear's 100 percent cotton -- it'll absorb whatever moisture a brief and furtive toweling leaves behind. There's no need to be so thorough down there, pelvic thrusting or no pelvic thrusting. What is UP WITH THAT?

Is this just a simple monkey dominance cue or am I missing something larger? Maybe it's an invitation to Fight Club and I'm just not getting the signal. Should I be doing a pevic thrust in the mirror when I dry off at the Y? Where does a man go to get this kind of information?

After I shaveblogged recently about Simpson's itsy-bitsy Wee Scot shaving brush, the famed Flying Dutchman, the infamous Netherlander brush collector, taunted me from afar by posting a photo on a shavegeek forum of his Wee Scots, one current and one vintage:



To my utter dismay, the Dutch Boy's vintage Wee Scot is even smaller than my new Wee Scot -- a full half-inch smaller. Doesn't sound like a big deal, but when you're talking about a brush onloy 2-1/2" tall, it's huge.

Tulip Boy's got 600+ shaving brushes, most of them high-dollar jobs well beyond the budget of most shavegeeks proles, but his mania never bothered me till now. That photo of the even-smaller Wee Scot hurt. Hurt deep. Here I was, thinking I had the world's smallest shaving brush, and he smokes me like a joint at the Bulldog.

As luck would have it, though, I just got the vintage Simpson Wee Scot I recently scored on eBay, and though it isn't the smaller version Delft Boy's got, it's even better than that -- because unlike my new Wee Scot, or Dutchie's new Wee Scot, or his old Wee Scot, my old Wee Scot has silvertip badger bristles!

Look at the photo of my two brushes. On the left is my new Wee Scot, and on the right, wearing the yellowed trunks and standing at a slight angle, is the vintage Wee Scot I scored for the princely sum of $24 including shipping. And though the original box says "best badger", this brush clearly has what would now be classified as genuine silvertip.

I keep hearing old-timers say that modern silvertip isn't nearly as soft on the face as older silvertip brushes, and this vintage Wee Scot follows that line. While its bristles are stiffer and springier than the best badger grade hair on my new Wee Scot, they feel very, very soft on my skin, with none of the prickliness I feel when using a modern silvertip brush like my Vulfix #2235S.

Though the handle is nicely yellowed with age, I've got no idea how old my vintage Simpson is -- I've sent the pics to Simpson in the UK to see if they can date it. You can see that the older brush has a slightly different handle shape than the current version, and the shape of the bristle bunch is more rounded and less fan-like than the new Scot. I can tell you that whatever the vintage brush's age, it's in excellent shape, holds an amazing amount of water, and lathers just as fantastically as my new Wee Scot. It's only "flaw" is a slight bump on the bottom of the handle, which makes the brush lean to one side when you set it down on a flat surface, but who gives an amsterdamn. If anything, it adds to the brush's off-kilter charm.

So we're at a stand-off, the Dutchman and me. He has a Nano Scot, and I have a Silver Sliver. The only way to win this is to find a Silver Nano. Did one ever exist? Must find it. Must defeat the Dutchman.

I hate Vegas -- god, how I hate Vegas -- but I love the Forum Shops at Caesar's. Specifically, the new multi-level wing they just put in a little over a year ago. If ever Vegas had a mitigating factor, this is it.

There's Il Mulino, the best restaurant in Vegas (after Baja Fresh), and Vosges Chocolates, and Penhaligon's, the venerated British perfume house with the impossibly elegant upper crust colognes that all smell like James Bond's bollocks.

I was in Vegas for CES last week, so as soon as I got my fill of the non-news this year's show had just oodles of, I cut out and headed over to Caesar's Forum Shops to decompress. And as I always do, I stopped by the Truefitt & Hill shop in Caesar's.

For those of you who haven't been, the Truefitt's shop in Vegas is a shavegeek's paradise, with a full selection of shaving creams, razors, brushes, and leather shaving kits in the front, and an old-school barbershop in the back done up in dark wood and overstuffed leather barber chairs where Truefitt's master barbers dish out straight razor shaves you have to experience to believe. This is where I got the closest shave of my life last year (and at $65 a pop, you bet your ass I wanted bone to show), and where the straight razor shave is so pampering and relaxing that most guys nod off in the middle.

My pal Daphne runs the joint, and before I left she gave me a tub of Truefitt's new "Ultimate Comfort" shaving cream to try. She said it was a very different kind of cream than Truefitt's traditional mainstays like West Indian Limes, Trafalgar, and 1805, and that it was part of a whole new line of men's grooming products aimed at younger guys who want high-end wetshaving without the strongly scented products us older shavegeeks love so dearly.

Now, this is the part I don't get. Truefitt apparently did some research and found that young men prefer unscented products when it comes to shaving, so that's why the new Ultimate Comfort shaving cream is mostly unscented (I say mostly because it does have a bit of lavender essential oil, so there's a pleasant but extremely subtle lavender note way down there -- about a 1 on the volume control compared to traditional lavender creams like Taylor, Harris).

The thing is, every young guy I run into smells so strongly of CK1, Axe, Polo, Joop, or whatever the hell other godawful mall men's counter crap they're into that I just find it hard to believe these same guys would shy away from scented shaving creams. Hell, I wore Obsession too, back when I was a 20-something idjut. It's what young guys do. We think a spicy, piercing spoor is going to get us laid, and if memory serves, it did. Nowadays that stuff smells like paint thinner to me, but back then I thought I smelled, um, doable. Ah, youth.

Really, if a younger guy somehow wears cologne that's actually subtle and elegant, he's probably like my 5th grade friend Henry whose parents were in their 60s when they had him so he had a haircut like Dagwood and wore cardigans and loafers and said things like "If Stassen hadn't given his delegates to Ike, Taft would've taken this country back to the horse and buggy". I mean, it's not normal for young guys to wear grown-up scents. The jackass years are meant to be spent acting, looking, and smelling like a jackass. That's why they're called the jackass years. It's a stupid, smelly period in a man's life. So why Truefitt & Hill thinks young guys don't want scented shaving cream is beyond me.

All jackass theorizing aside, the new Ultimate Comfort cream is an interesting animal. It's a whole different thing than Truefitt's classic shaving creams, which are thicker, drier, and more dense. The Ultimate Comfort cream is what I call "new-school" -- creamier and "wetter" than the traditional English creams like Trumper, Taylor, and Truefitt, less about soaps and artifical colorants and fragrances, and more about essential oils and skin-friendliness. Nancy Boy's excellent shaving cream comes to mind as the standard-bearer of this new breed, and I'd add the brushless Cremo Cream to the group as well.

The new-school shaving creams are creamier than their forebearers and much easier to lather with -- they're practically halfway there right out of the tub, so you don't get that newbie learning curve that drives so many budding shavegeeks nuts as they flail around trying to get the water-to-cream ratio right in order to make lather with a shaving brush that's not so runny it drips down your chest, but not so dry it doesn't lube your skin.

The new Truefitt's cream comes in a grey plastic jar that's a dead ringer for the white plastic jar Nancy Boy comes in, and sure enough, when I flipped them both over, they have identical markings and molding on the bottoms of the tubs. Truefitt's version is grey with raised "TRUEFITT & HILL" lettering around the edge of the lid, and the cream is made in Canada, while Nancy Boy's is made in the Bay Area. Sourcing its new cream from Canada is a radical move for Truefitt & Hill, England's oldest barbershop and one of the most tradition-minded of the old-school English shaving firms. All of their classic shaving creams are made in the UK by Creighton's, which also makes Trumper's, Taylor's, Harris's, and most of the other old-school English brands.

Daphne told me that the Ultimate Comfort cream has more glycerin than Truefitt's old-school creams, and sure enough, when you crack the lid, the cream positively glistens. The formula is more "pure" as well, with no colorants or perfumes, just a touch of lavender essential oil to soothe the skin and add a bit of scent to the cream. This is the kind of shaving cream the Fisher King would like a lot, I'm guessing. He's a champion of the new-school, skin-friendly creams like Nancy Boy and especially Shaving Gallery, which happens to have a very similar formula to the new Truefitt's cream.

I'm right there with Fish. I love some of the old-school English creams (you can have my Trumper's Violet, Taylor's Avocado, and Harris's Lavender when you pry my cold, dead fingers from around them), but these new-school creams really spoil you for anything else. I've been using Nancy Boy for weeks now and it just blows me away how astonishingly excellent this moderately priced shaving cream is. It practically bursts into full-blown lather by the time you bring the brush up to your face, shaves like a dream, and leaves my skin feeling soft and moisturized instead of dry and tight the way many of the old-school creams do.

The new Truefitt cream reminds me a lot of Nancy Boy -- it's a very similar shave, but without the NB's strong lavender/peppermint.rosemary scent. You just get a subtle whiff of lavender, way down there in the mix. The shave itself is right up there with Nancy Boy's -- instant perfect lather, all the lubrication you'd ever want, and afterward my face feels great. If my skin felt a tad less moisturized then when I shave with Nancy Boy, it was a very slight difference. For all practical purposes, these two creams (I haven't tried Shaving Gallery's yet) give the same kind of shave. If you love Nancy Boy but wish it came in a (mostly) unscented version with just a soupcon of lavender, Truefitt's Ultimate Comfort is what you're wishing for.

Now, Truefitt's new cream does cost around double what Nancy Boy's does -- $22 plus $8.13 for UPS shipping to my address on the East Coast, while Nancy Boy's cream is $13.60 and you get free shipping with orders over $25, which is easy to do if you peruse the rest of their line. On price alone, Nancy Boy's the clear winner.

But I know a lot of repressed shavegeeks who just aren't down with the whole Nancy Boy schtick, and wouldn't be caught dead using a shaving cream designed by a gay couple in San Francisco and based on the lavender, peppermint, and rosemary they grow in their herb garden outside their apartment, where, I think it's safe to assume, a man makes love to another man. It's not exactly Sir Winston saving the world between brandies and Romeo y Julietas, which is the template lots of shavegeeks have in their mind when it comes to wetshaving. It's all Churchill all the time, not "Brokeback Shaving". So for these guys who just can't get with Nancy Boy, at least they can get the same kind of new-school shaving cream from Churchill's own favored brand.

I really like Truefitt & Hill's new Ultimate Comfort shaving cream. This is my kind of cream. In fact, I prefer it to Truefitt's old-school creams -- especially in these dry winter months, my skin is much happier with creams like the Ultimate Comfort and Nancy Boy than it is with many of my favorite old-school creams. It's a nice surprise to see an old-school English shaving firm with such a long, hallowed history as Truefitt & Hill adapt to the times and deliver a new-school shaving cream that's in many ways superior to its own classic products. Highly recommended.

So I tried a new barbershop this week, an old-school Italian place in our downtown. The kind of place where grown-ups get $15 haircuts, elderly Italian customers are never charged and are told to give their regards to Don somebody (I didn't catch the last name), and no dance music is heard unless you enjoy dancing to Connie Francis and Mario Lanza.

For years I've been going to salons, mainly because I like the shampoo and head massage beforehand. I love it, in fact. So much so that I've endured what have been in retrospect way overpriced haircuts, merely to get someone (okay, it's usually a hot girl) to vigorously shampoo my head and knead my scalp and temples with her fingers and, on a few blessed occasions, fingernails.

But no more. It's barbershops, and old man barbers, from now. Enough is enough. Time to get real.

So I'm eyeing the two well-used Campbell Lather King hot shaving lather machines on the counter as (we'll call him) Tino is cutting my hair.

"Tino, you do straight razor shaves?" I ask.

"Sure I do," he replies, "but I don't think your face is up to that kind of shave. Lemme see something," and with that, he presses two of his fat sausage fingers against my cheek and removes them. A red mark remains for a second or two.

"Your skin is too sensitive for a shave like that," Tino informs me.

"So what do you recommend I shave with, then?"

Tino thinks for a moment as he continues cutting my hair. I had asked him for just a clean-up, no real shortening, just a general tidying, but he is clearly giving me a full-on haircut and I will look like a small child on the first day of school when I attend CES the following day.

"You should use a very dull razor," Tino begins. "A Bic disposable, single-edge, for sensitive skin. And you should run a cork across the blade to dull it first. Don't use shaving cream. Not on your face. Use Noxzema cold cream."

I say nothing.

"Hey kid, don't feel bad -- I can't take a straight razor, neither. I got sensitive skin too. I'm even worse than you. I can only shave with a dull Bic --"

And here it comes:

"-- on DRY SKIN."

It takes me a moment to take it all in. I ask Tino if shaving on dry skin is, in fact, worse for sensitive skin than using cream, or even just warm water on the whiskers.

"Naw. I use cream, I break out in a rash. Gotta shave dry. That's the only thing that works for me."

So here I am, days later, trying to make sense of all this. I can't dismiss Tino -- not only does the man know what he's doing since he's been doing it for decades, but he could probably have me "shaved permanently".

Really, I don't think he's an ignoramus. I think he's privy to wisdom that's wholly outside the shavegeek dogmatic hash marks. Who knows more about what works best shaving -- a bunch of tittering shavegeeks on a forum, or a professional barber who's been shaving guys for generations? Never argue with a pro. You'll lose every time.

Except I don't want to believe that mu skin is really so sensitive that I should be using cork-dulled Bic disposables (which aren't bad razors, actually, if you don't go and intentionally dull them witha cork -- in a pinch, the Sensitive single-blade jobs, and especially the Bic Metals, can give a damn good shave if the rest of your prep is fine). And Noxzema cold cream?

I have to think about this.

"So what's this mystery midget brush you've been using lately?" demanded the Fisher King, my men's toiletry dominatrix.

I call him this because he delights in torturing me with a never ending supply of product recommendations, some so expensive I writhe in pain ($47 French shaving soap!) (okay so I gave in and bought a couple of bars of the maker's olive oil soap for 12 bucks apiece, heinous for a bar of soap, I know, but he says they're the best).

On the other hand, the Fisher King has turned me onto some titanic finds like Nancy Boy, for which I'll be eternally grateful -- not only has their shaving cream has become my main shavelube, but their ultra-pure lavender laundry soap (insanely great, and maybe their best product) is the only thing we'll feed our washer now.

But now it was my turn to crack the whip.

"How bad do you want to know the identity of my mystery midget brush?" I asked him as haughtily as one can while wearing a rubber Donald Duck suit and hanging by his heels from a swinging meat hook.

The Fisher King's eyes flashed. "Worm! Is it the Vulfix travel brush?"

"Nope."

"Kent BK2?"

"Hah! Not even close."

He got out a leather strop and began slapping it loudly against a chair.

"Tell me."

Well, since he put it that way..

It's the Simpson Wee Scot.

The smallest Simpson shaving brush of them all. The smallest anybody's shaving brush of them all.

Look at the photo at the top of the page -- that's the Wee Scot in the middle, barely coming up the top of the handle of the Vulfix #377 on the left. And that other Vulfix on the right? That's their little travel brush, the smallest brush Vulfix makes, and yet it looks like Big Daddy Lipscomb next to the Wee Scot.

I started thinking about the Wee Scot when it became clear to me that smaller shaving brushes are the way to go. After starting out with the big Vulfix #377 and then trying other big brushes like Vulfix's #40 and #41, I finally settled on the smaller numbers like the #2234 I mostly use. And truth be told, I love that little Vulfix travel brush-inna-tube -- it's all the brush I'd ever need, and I can get gobs of lather from this thing without even half trying.

Most shavegeeks go for the biggest brush they can hoist, and that should tell you all you need to know. While the herd chases after XXL Shavemacs, the smart boys know that smaller brushes actually work better. It's easier to get the water/cream ratio right, you can lather up without making a mess everywhere, and you don't wind up rinsing more cream down the drain than you used for the shave. It's also said that there's an inverse ratio between the size of a man's shaving brush and the size of his man-root, but far be it for me to brag about having the tiniest shaving brush in the world.

Simpson makes the Wee Scot as almost a novelty brush, for collectors. It's a genuine hand-made Simpson with high-end Best badger bristle, but it's so ridiculously small that nobody really takes it seriously, and none of Simpson's dealers keeps it in stock. You have to special order it, like I did from Lee at Lee's Razors.

And then there's the price -- $60. For those sheckels, you could have that larger Vulfix travel brush complete with nifty travel tube, or the much larger Vulfix #2234 in Super badger. Great brushes, both. But they don't tickle me like the Wee Scot does.

I mean, how else do you describe a shaving brush so tiny you can hold it between your thumb and index finger like a martini olive? You think it looks puny in the photo? You should hold this thing in your hand. It makes me smile every time I pick it up in the morning. It's barely there. When they shave in Who-ville, this is the brush they lather with.

And yet when I soak the Wee Scot in hot water and dip it into a tub of Nancy Boy shaving cream, damned if I don't get so much thick, rich lather that I can go three, four, even five passes and still have lather left over to flush down the sink. The Wee Scot may look like a dollhouse prop, but it holds enough water and has the kind of bristle grade and hand-tied contruction that shames many brushes that positively dwarf it.

Even if it's another Simpson.

The thing is, I've got a Chubby #1 in Best badger I paid $155 for a couple of years ago (got it from Lee's, in fact). Shavegeeks go nuts over this brush. Guys babble about how the Chubbies are hands-down the best brushes on the planet. The most knowledgable guy I know when it comes to shaving brushes even told me that the CH1 is the best brush he's ever used when it comes to hard soaps.

So how come I like the Wee Scot so much better?

Really, it's no contest. The Wee Scot lather circles around the Chubby, whether I use Nancy Boy or Taylor's shaving cream, or Classic Shaving's Lilac shaving soap. I wish I'd gotten the Wee Scot in the first place instead of the Chubby -- it just flat works better for me. Despite the Wee Scot's diminutive size, its bristles splay out to a surprisingly wide spread when you mash this brush against your puss, and the exquisite lather just keeps coming and coming.

But the Wee Scot also has incredible control, as well -- you can target the lather with this thing to a degree impossible with larger brushes, and place the lather exactly where you want it, and nowhere else. With the big brushes, I always wind up with lather all over my chest, and the sink, and the bathroom floor. By comparison, lathering with the Wee Scot is so precise it's almost surgical.

What started off as a lark -- a lunge in the exact opposite direction of the shavegeek herd, just to see how low can you go -- has become (dare I say it?) my favorite shaving brush of any I've tried. I love the Wee Scot so much I just bought another one for my travel rig. This tiny brush is a big smile.

Give me micro. That's the way toward the light. Give me a skinny-ass Gillette Super Speed DE razor from the 40's, a small travel tub of Nancy Boy shaving cream, and a Simpson's Wee Scot, and I'm going to get a better shave per square inch than anything else going.