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Puck vs. Stick: Historical perspective

Some recent excellent posts by mblakele have got me wondering:

We often kick around the "puck vs. stick" question in regards to what we prefer or how to use them.

What I'd like to explore in this thread is the history of pucks, or mug soap, and shave sticks.

When did soap first meet mug and brush? Were the early soaps pucks, or rounds? When was the first soap marketed as shave soap? When was the first shave stick marketed? Was there a crest in shave stick popularity in the US around the time of WWI? Did other alternatives (brushless creams or powders) ever make a serious dent in the market? How quickly did the aerosol can take over the vast majority of the shaving market?

How different is our use of shave soap and sticks from what our ancestors did 50 years ago? A century? Two centuries? We've all seen the old brushes that have taken a set "swoop", did they leave them wet and loaded between shaves? How well off did you have to be to have a mug at the barbershop? Was there a community mug for the non-regular customers?

Most of my knowledge is anecdotal at best, picked up from reading old ads, some vintage barber's books, or just in the "I dunno, never thought of that" category.

Let's kick this around. I'm pretty sure some of our members were around when some of this stuff started! :001_tt2:
 
A 2009 post from B&Ber Spatterdash....

Try this on for size...

"From the beginning of the 7th century soap was produced in Nablus (Palestine), Kufa (Iraq) and Basra (Iraq). Soaps, as we know them today, are descendants of historical Arabian Soaps. Arabian Soap was perfumed and colored, while some of the soaps were liquid and others were solid. They also had special shaving soap for shaving. It was commercially sold for 3 Dirhams (0.3 Dinars) a piece in 981 AD. A manuscript of Al-Razi (Rhazes) contains various modern recipes for soap. A recently discovered manuscript from the 13th century details more recipes for soap making, e.g. take some sesame oil, a sprinkle of potash, alkali and some lime, mix them all together, and boil. When cooked, they are poured into molds and left to set, leaving hard soap (soap bar).[67]


Found that in Wikipedia, under alchemy in Medieval Islam. Google rules. You'll note the date, 981 AD. Just to give you an idea of the the world outlook at the time, Europe is suffering the Dark Ages, Christianity is at the height of it's Monastic phase as hermits and teachers flee the influence of the Mediterranean power bases of the Church, Nordic and Danish Warriors are ravaging the coasts (going viking, which is a verb, not a noun or an adjective) of Europe and the Isles, and it will be another 85 years before the Normans conquer England and declare victory at the Battle of Hastings.

You really don't see soaps marketed to the West specifically for shaving until after the Industrial Revolution, when plants, oils and spices were affordable to the working and middle classes. One of the oldest?
Yep. Williams shaving soap. It was available during the Civil War.
 
A 1906 patent for a shaving mug cover. Seems we aren't the first to try and keep the dust out of our mugs, although they didn't have the plastic covers from Smokehouse Almond tins the year that Susan B. Anthony died.
 
Nice one, and I would love to learn more. Spatterdash made several good points, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap#History_of_cleansing_soaps is interesting. The wikipedia article adds that soap dates back to about 2800 BC. It goes on to say that the ancient Romans didn't use soap for hygiene, but as a sort of hair gel. Still, our word "soap" comes from a Latin word "sapo".

The marketing of commercial products is relatively recent, but there were shaving soap recipes in books published well before the USA civil war (http://books.google.com/books?id=QA..."&pg=PA200#v=onepage&q="shaving soap"&f=false). I think you could get both phenomena at the same time, too: consider that a housewife in 1820s NYC might buy soap, while her cousin in Kentucky might have to make her own.

I went back to google books to look for shaving stick ads, and found this from the UK 1849 "Law Times". Google doesn't have everything, of course, and I'd love to see an earlier reference to shaving sticks: http://books.google.com/books?id=6t...ook_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CE8Q6AEwAA

Here's something interesting from 1810, if you can stand the typography. Beware, for here are long eshes (ſ) and greengrocers' apostrophes. http://books.google.com/books?id=melbAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false - "A treatise on razors By Benjamin Kingsbury (razor-maker.)" As a sign of the times, he argues the benefits of shaving powder (powdered soap).

And just to show that YMMV even then, on p41 we read that he doesn't like "Naples soap", which I think of as Cella and its cousins. He prefers soaps based on olive oil – oh, the humanity! But I've read elsewhere that poppy seed oil was often sold as olive, or olive often adulterated with poppy, and that saponified poppy seed oil might make good lather (see http://books.google.com/books?id=7CLrAAAAMAAJ&dq=poppy seed olive oil&pg=PA322#v=onepage&q&f=false and http://books.google.com/books?id=cA...A179#v=onepage&q=poppy seed olive oil&f=false for examples). It's also possible that a lot of the Naples soap he saw was past its prime, due to slow transportation links, or entirely counterfeit.

Here's the kind of soap dish I had in mind when I mentioned globes. But possibly these were closer to modern pucks, and the large dish was a preference.
 
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Luc

"To Wiki or Not To Wiki, That's The Question".
Staff member
Very interesting topic gents!
 
Top asked about puck vs stick popularity. I would be the first to agree that google books is a poor proxy for knowing how folks actually shaved, but google does provide tools for easy analysis. So take the results with a grain of salt, but I hope that they will be useful anyhow.

In the chart below the "safety razor" term acts like a control: we know that safety razors existed for some time before 1900, but we expect their rise to correspond roughly with Gillette. By the 1950s "safety razor" begins to decline, but we know that the Trac II didn't arrive until the 1970s. This suggests to me that safety razors were the rule, and straight razors were the exception, so there was no longer any reason to write "safety razor". We can also see some decline of soaps and brushes, presumably corresponding to a rise in canned lather products.

Moving on to shave sticks.... From this data it appears that shaving sticks never really captured the attention of writers and advertisers. Note that I didn't look specifically for pucks, because that term seems to be relatively modern. Older works on shaving talk about cakes or dishes of soap. But when a source mentions shaving soap and doesn't mention shaving stick, I think we can take it that a cake or puck was intended.



The green line "shaving stick" in the above chart becomes the blue line in the next chart, but we have zoomed in to show the full range of data. Now we can see "shaving stick" grow in popularity from about 1900, reaching a peak just before the Great Depression. There was a brief revival during WWII, but then the term slipped into obscurity. So it looks to me like sticks were always marginal, and were pushed out of their niche by canned lather even more easily than pucks were. This makes sense to me: if you ignore quality, cans offer hygiene and convenience, while those who are more price-conscious might stay with pucks.

 
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I think mblakele is kind of right. Most men shaved at home hence the abudance of pucks and rounds. I think sticks were mostly used by travelers but probably were not bumped for canned foams but rather the early brushed and brushless creams. We do know that Palmolive in the tubes was still available here in the US up until a couple of years ago, even amoungst the cans of foam, but we didn't see any Shave Sticks. I think the fall out of tube creams, brushes, and pucks here in the US it probably caused by our susceptibilty to being marketed the newest greatest thing.

Jay
 
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I think mblakele is kind of right. Most men shaved at home hence the abudance of pucks and rounds. I think sticks were mostly used by travelers but probably were not bumped for canned foams but rather the early brushed and brushless creams. We do know that Palmolive in the tubes was still available here in the US up until a couple of years ago, even amoungst the cans of foam, but we didn't see any Shave Sticks. I think the fall out of tube creams, brushes, and pucks here in the US it probably caused by our susceptibilty to being marketed the newest greatest thing.

Jay

Me too.
 
Well my Father was definatley using a stick in the 1970's. Erasmic with the red end on the stick. Remeber that very clearly. So we can go back to the early 1970's with certainty.
 
Follow up question - why are shave sticks so prevalent in the UK and Europe but almost unknown in the US?

Don't know the answer but like the question. Locally I can get 4 sticks (Arko, De Vergulde Hand, Tabac and Palmolive) and only 3 pucks (De Vergulde Hand, Kruidvat (drugstore chain) and Tabac) that I know of.
 
I'm going to guess that much of the popularity of US Shave sticks came with the introduction of the safety razor to Sailors, Doughboys and Marines during WWI. A shave stick was part of the gear, and I'd wager a lot of guys would want to "stick" with it once they got out of uniform. The dive right before WWII is about when Shulton started providing Old Spice in the mug...coincidence?

I just took a look at an 1896 Ad for Williams, they sold their soap in "four forms" The shaving "tablet (what we'd call a puck), just fits the cup, delightfully perfumed", the Yankee Soap in what I assume to be a bar, the shaving stick, and a six pack roll of "barber's rounds". The six pack, one pound, sold for 40 cents, the tablet and stick both for two bits. They make no mention of different ingredients or formulas, other than the scent of the tablet.

A 1918 issue of the Gillette Blade has an article penned by a somebody from the Mennen company basically knocking hard soaps and the need for hot water. The writer refers to "the advent of the sanitary shave sticks supplanting the cake of soap"!, something perhaps that Gillette saw as the trend because they were selling shaving sticks. He seemed to think that the future would belong to soft soap.
 
How different is our use of shave soap and sticks from what our ancestors did 50 years ago? .... I'm pretty sure some of our members were around when some of this stuff started! :001_tt2:

Yes, I will admit to being old enough to shave 50 years ago. My dad was still using his Old Spice mug and soap and an EverReady boar brush. Shortly after that was about when he started moving to Colgate canned shaving cream, and that's probably what I started with. I did buy my own Old Spice mug and soap and EverReady boar brush in the early 1970's and used them for a few years before succumbing to the lure of shaving gel in a can. I still have that Old Spice mug, and it has vintage Old Spice soap in it once again.
 
Was the US ever a big producer of shaving soap/sticks?

I think so. JB Williams and Colgate produced lots of product.

From an article on the JB Williams historical district...

"During the 19th century the business prospered as indicated by the 1859 J.B. Williams Italianate mansion and the 1892 David W. Williams Queen Anne/Shingle Style house, but production facilities were on a comparatively modest scale. An 1890 group photo shows 17 factory workers. At about the turn of the century, as use of shaving soap became widespread, the business burgeoned, increased in scale many times over, and the brick buildings were constructed on the south side of the street. Floor space exceeded 225,000 square feet. The years between World War I and World War II were the company's years of greatest strength. After World War II additional products and trade names were developed and purchased (Aqua Velva, Lectric Shave, Kreml, Conti, Skol) but continued success was elusive. "

So, it seems that the peak of US shave stick production was as we've guessed, between the world wars.
 
Interesting topic.

I'm wondering after the Second World War what influence the electric razor had on all this. I seem to recall in t960's seeing a lot of men with electrics.

Reading this discussion, I'm also mindful of the idea that each generation subtly rebels against it's parent's generations. I'm thinking something like when the children of adults who smoked Camels and Luckys, started smoking they picked up Winstons and Marlboros.
 
We've all seen the old brushes that have taken a set "swoop", did they leave them wet and loaded between shaves?

I don't really remember how Dad stored his brush, but I remember that there wasn't much room in the medicine cabinet or much counter space, so it is quite plausible that he left his brush in the mug. I know that he didn't have a brush stand.
 
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