Item Description
This soap was a real disappointment to me. I like the idea of mass produced shaving soaps, like Williams or Van der Hagen/Surrey & Tabac, among a handful of others, because it legitimizes my particular insanity (I mean, heck, if they sell shaving soap at Walgreens, can I be all that crazy?). Master is not sold in stores, as far as I know, but is distributed to barbers and other professionals through barber supply and beauty stores and websites. Among the venerable Master Chemical Company's other products, we find a number of excellent aftershaves. So, I thought, maybe their soap would be a sort of "sleeper" -- an excellent soap that has quietly been produced for eons in some old brick factory in Illinois, where boilersuit clad "Master Men" have expertly toiled for decades, shunning trade union interference and passing their tenured jobs down to their first born sons, and.... well you get the idea 
But it was not to be. The first sign was that my puck of Master, purchased from Appleton Barber Supply for a little north of a buck-a-puck, smelled exactly like a urinal disinfectant puck (I worked as a janitor in High School, so I know). The scent is meant to be "lilac," but so is the scent of urinal pucks and other industrial disinfectants, almost all of which have the nauseating blend of lilac an naptha (the stuff mothballs are made of). As with Pinaud's Lilac Vegetal, in this case a little lilac goes more than a long way...
Nonetheless, the industrial beauty of the puck, embossed with the venerable Master Chemical Co. logo, impressed me, so Master gets high marks for the non-existent "puck presentation" category:
Holding my nose, I decided to give this soap a whirl, still harboring unreasonably high expectations. I tend to shake my brush fairly dry before I charge it with a soap, but the Master, comfortably housed in the Marvy rubber mug, still managed to produce a rather soupy proto-lather:
Still, I soldiered on, but the brush would not be adequately charged:
Half-heartedly, I went for the obligatory lather-on-hand picture. At first the lather looked OK, though thin. But by the time I picked up the camera to take a picture, it began to disappear:
Things went downhill from here. The lather fared no better on my face than it did on my hand, and while the soap had some lubricative qualities, it was not efficacious enough to overcome the vile scent and the disappearing lather. I have not used this since, but I have attempted to lather it several times just to be fair, even using different brushes -- always with the same thin, disappearing result. To make matters worse, the scent precludes this puck from being used a shower or hand soap. I am sad
But it was not to be. The first sign was that my puck of Master, purchased from Appleton Barber Supply for a little north of a buck-a-puck, smelled exactly like a urinal disinfectant puck (I worked as a janitor in High School, so I know). The scent is meant to be "lilac," but so is the scent of urinal pucks and other industrial disinfectants, almost all of which have the nauseating blend of lilac an naptha (the stuff mothballs are made of). As with Pinaud's Lilac Vegetal, in this case a little lilac goes more than a long way...
Nonetheless, the industrial beauty of the puck, embossed with the venerable Master Chemical Co. logo, impressed me, so Master gets high marks for the non-existent "puck presentation" category:
Holding my nose, I decided to give this soap a whirl, still harboring unreasonably high expectations. I tend to shake my brush fairly dry before I charge it with a soap, but the Master, comfortably housed in the Marvy rubber mug, still managed to produce a rather soupy proto-lather:
Still, I soldiered on, but the brush would not be adequately charged:
Half-heartedly, I went for the obligatory lather-on-hand picture. At first the lather looked OK, though thin. But by the time I picked up the camera to take a picture, it began to disappear:
Things went downhill from here. The lather fared no better on my face than it did on my hand, and while the soap had some lubricative qualities, it was not efficacious enough to overcome the vile scent and the disappearing lather. I have not used this since, but I have attempted to lather it several times just to be fair, even using different brushes -- always with the same thin, disappearing result. To make matters worse, the scent precludes this puck from being used a shower or hand soap. I am sad
