I recently joined B&B and saw the journal section. I read a lot of posts in various journal, although I have to admit that I didn't read all the thousands of replies some journal have! 
It made me wonder, should I start writing my own journal? What do I have to offer that might be interesting to others? How is my story about getting into wetshaving, my mild case of RAD developing from the moment I started and my search for the ideal blade different from any other story? Will someone even read it if I start writing a journal?
Well, let's find out!
Introduction
Let's start with an introduction. Born and raised in the south of the Netherlands and I have been shaving since my mid teens. At the very beginning, having to shave was cool. I was becoming a man! Of course, the fuzzy beard (if you could even call it a beard) was nothing compared to a adult man's beard.
But as I grew older and my beard got coarser, shaving became less and less cool and more of a burden. I used the readily available cartridge and I think I tried them all: Gillette, Wilkinson, store brands of all drug stores in The Netherlands, 2 blades, 3 blades, 5 blades. You name it I tried it. All with the same result: skin irritation, ingrown hairs. I couldn't shave daily because it would slowly turn me in to a tomato-red, pimply mess. I really, really hated shaving!
At one day, some 20 years ago, my granddad looked at me after a really a bad shave and said Boy, you should use a safety razor! That will give you a much better shave, trust me! I've been using one for almost 75 years.
Sure granddad. Let's use an antique and dangerous looking apparatus. Times have changed! So I was stubborn and moved from cartridges to electric razors. Yikes.....
Fast forward to 2018 or so. I had been using cartridges ever since but managed to improve the shaving experience a bit by using a decent shaving soap (Proraso Green) instead of canned creams. But I still hated it. Philips released its OneBlade device a couple of years earlier. It's not really a razor but a trimmer. I decided to give it a go, to finally get rid of the irritation and ingrown hair. And it worked! Of course, it wasn't nearly as smooth as a good shave but at least I was free of irritation! I still didn't like shaving though.
Let's skip a few year again, to February 2024 to be exact. My wife came home from a fair with a new razor as she read that it could really reduce irritation. I thought it was yet another cartridge but to my surprise she showed me a safety razor! An unknown brand, called Bamboozy. Research I recently did learned me that it is probably a Chinese Haward D657.
I was cautious, because it was a similar razor as my granddad showed me all these years ago. Did she fall for a sales pitch? Or does it really work? I was curious, but still cautious. But when my wife used it for the first time and she didn't come running for the first aid kit afterwards, I became more than curious!
Then next couple of days I watched tons of videos on how to use a safety razor and looking up the advantages until I finally was up to trying it myself. Cautiously I loaded a new blade in the razor, created a nice lather and started shaving. Very cautiously I handled the deadly razor, getting more confident with each stroke and I even dared to go ATG in my first shave! That first shave took me 45 minutes. I won't pretend it was the best shave ever, but I was still alive! Not even a single weeper! And my skin, although not completely free of irritation, wasn't nearly as raw and irritated as it was with a cartridge. Could it be that my (back then) 90 y/o granddad was right?
Within the hour, the irritation I had even disappeared. And in the days after that first shave, no ingrown hairs formed at all! This marked the beginning of my Safety Razor journey and I haven't looked back since. I did apologies to my late granddad though, for not believing him. He was right...
More to come in the next posts
It made me wonder, should I start writing my own journal? What do I have to offer that might be interesting to others? How is my story about getting into wetshaving, my mild case of RAD developing from the moment I started and my search for the ideal blade different from any other story? Will someone even read it if I start writing a journal?
Well, let's find out!
Introduction
Let's start with an introduction. Born and raised in the south of the Netherlands and I have been shaving since my mid teens. At the very beginning, having to shave was cool. I was becoming a man! Of course, the fuzzy beard (if you could even call it a beard) was nothing compared to a adult man's beard.
But as I grew older and my beard got coarser, shaving became less and less cool and more of a burden. I used the readily available cartridge and I think I tried them all: Gillette, Wilkinson, store brands of all drug stores in The Netherlands, 2 blades, 3 blades, 5 blades. You name it I tried it. All with the same result: skin irritation, ingrown hairs. I couldn't shave daily because it would slowly turn me in to a tomato-red, pimply mess. I really, really hated shaving!
At one day, some 20 years ago, my granddad looked at me after a really a bad shave and said Boy, you should use a safety razor! That will give you a much better shave, trust me! I've been using one for almost 75 years.
Sure granddad. Let's use an antique and dangerous looking apparatus. Times have changed! So I was stubborn and moved from cartridges to electric razors. Yikes.....
Fast forward to 2018 or so. I had been using cartridges ever since but managed to improve the shaving experience a bit by using a decent shaving soap (Proraso Green) instead of canned creams. But I still hated it. Philips released its OneBlade device a couple of years earlier. It's not really a razor but a trimmer. I decided to give it a go, to finally get rid of the irritation and ingrown hair. And it worked! Of course, it wasn't nearly as smooth as a good shave but at least I was free of irritation! I still didn't like shaving though.
Let's skip a few year again, to February 2024 to be exact. My wife came home from a fair with a new razor as she read that it could really reduce irritation. I thought it was yet another cartridge but to my surprise she showed me a safety razor! An unknown brand, called Bamboozy. Research I recently did learned me that it is probably a Chinese Haward D657.
I was cautious, because it was a similar razor as my granddad showed me all these years ago. Did she fall for a sales pitch? Or does it really work? I was curious, but still cautious. But when my wife used it for the first time and she didn't come running for the first aid kit afterwards, I became more than curious!
Then next couple of days I watched tons of videos on how to use a safety razor and looking up the advantages until I finally was up to trying it myself. Cautiously I loaded a new blade in the razor, created a nice lather and started shaving. Very cautiously I handled the deadly razor, getting more confident with each stroke and I even dared to go ATG in my first shave! That first shave took me 45 minutes. I won't pretend it was the best shave ever, but I was still alive! Not even a single weeper! And my skin, although not completely free of irritation, wasn't nearly as raw and irritated as it was with a cartridge. Could it be that my (back then) 90 y/o granddad was right?
Within the hour, the irritation I had even disappeared. And in the days after that first shave, no ingrown hairs formed at all! This marked the beginning of my Safety Razor journey and I haven't looked back since. I did apologies to my late granddad though, for not believing him. He was right...
More to come in the next posts
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