I recently heard about Cade and was excited to give it a go a)because it seems to get pretty consistent rave reviews and b)my 3 month old son is named Cade and I find something nostalgic about it, especially since I am looking forward to introducing him to wet shaving with grandpa's restored and silver plated SS. So far after four days I don't like it at all. Very weak thin lather I have tried badger and boar, straight and DE, and varied the amount of moisture on the brush as much as possible. I normally use Proraso green (well actually C.O. Bigelow...) and love it. I'm guessing my technique for using a triple milled soap needs to be refined. HELP!!!
Cade let me down!
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It is one of those soaps that takes getting used to. Personally I LOVE the scent. It really is fantastic to me. But I did not get the best it had to offer until I learned just how much loading it needed, and the water addition. Lots of practice was the difference.
Don't give up just yet.
Don't give up just yet.
It's a soap that takes a little extra time to get to know, but once you do it's one of the best. Here's the typical lather I can get from Cade now. Keep at it!
Moisten the top of the puck with a little water before you load he brush. Take a pre-soaked brush and squeeze the water out. Really load the brush from the puck. I would give it a minute of swirling until you get your technique down. Slowly add water as you bowl or face lather, and it will build nicely. Too much water too fast will leave you with a frothy mess. Check out the Cade Challenge thread here in this forum as well for all sorts of perspectives and tips.
I agree that it took a while to get right. For me, what works best is 30-45 seconds of loading with a fairly dry brush. I then add more water to the brush and face lather. It takes a minute or so to build the lather while dipping the tip of the brush in water a couple of times. Since getting to know this soap, I routinely get great lather from it.
There is a thread called "The Cade Challenge" that is like a graduate course this soap.
Everything you could want to know will be found there.
Everything you could want to know will be found there.
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Bretheren,
thanks for the advice. I'm going to work through the challenge posts and will probably finish out the year on Cade. I really want to love this soap, I'm sure it will be worth the work. My technique will undoubtably improve too. Using the Proraso in the tube is almost like cheating it's so easy compared to this!
thanks for the advice. I'm going to work through the challenge posts and will probably finish out the year on Cade. I really want to love this soap, I'm sure it will be worth the work. My technique will undoubtably improve too. Using the Proraso in the tube is almost like cheating it's so easy compared to this!
Cade lathers just fine for me, too: see here. As always, if your lather is weak then it is almost invariably an indicator that you haven't picked up sufficient soap. Use a dryer brush (but do leave some moisture in it otherwise it still won't work!) and load longer. Don't time: judge by the looks of the proto-lather instead. It should be thick and very soapy.
This is helpful folks, as I too am having trouble getting the Cade right.
I have only tried it twice and will have another go at it again today.
I have only tried it twice and will have another go at it again today.
I think that the Cade is well worth the effort. Not only does it smell great, it works very well once you get it down.
Let me put in a plug for Cade cream too. If people think Cade soap is difficult, Cade cream is seen as being impossible. Not so! If you like lots of Cade in your routine, give the cream a chance too. It requires a bit more than usual, but it smells just as nice as the soap and works like a charm. I get consistently good results face lathering with it.
Let me put in a plug for Cade cream too. If people think Cade soap is difficult, Cade cream is seen as being impossible. Not so! If you like lots of Cade in your routine, give the cream a chance too. It requires a bit more than usual, but it smells just as nice as the soap and works like a charm. I get consistently good results face lathering with it.
I still can't get my lather to look like that. Can you describe your process? How long to you load? How much water do you typically add? How long do you work it? Gimme all the details!
I've found that Cade and MWF needs to be treated about the same to get a nice lather, as mentioned before a fairly dry brush and lots of loading.
I am surprised to hear this 
. it works into an extremely moist lather, with very little effort (for me at least) 
. I would say you probably need to load more of it onto the brush
I don't know if water quality makes a difference with this soap (I always use filtered or distilled)
. it works into an extremely moist lather, with very little effort (for me at least) . I would say you probably need to load more of it onto the brushI don't know if water quality makes a difference with this soap (I always use filtered or distilled)
The typical recipe. Cade is not any different from most soaps in that it is poor in potassium compounds. Hard or soft brushes don't matter either (or rather, with proper attitute don't matter).
- Pick a nice, quiet moment. Don't time yourself.
- Soak brush of preference in hot water (60 to 65 degrees C is just fine. Boiling hot just degrades the brush.)
- Squeeze and shake the brush firmly until no water remains in it. The hairs of the brush should stand out on their own at this stage. If they clump together, there's too much moisture in it still. Flick that wrist!
- Sprinkle a few drops of water onto the puck, begin loading. When you load, don't press the brush flat against the surface of the puck. Don't touch it with just the tips. Don't turn the entire thing upside down either: with so little water in the brush this would be very counterproductive. Make gentle rotations at a frequency of about 2 per second. Try to avoid mixing air into the lather just yet (i.e., go at it gently).
- Soon the puck will be dry. Sprinkle some more water, and continue loading. Repeat two to three times.
- At some point you will notice that you cannot contain the lather in the brush anymore. From time to time fold that lather onto the top of the puck surface, then work it in with the brush.
- Make an occasional 'pump' motion to have the brush hoover up some of the thick lather that's forming. The brush acts as a suction pad in this case. I can hang an entire puck weighing well over 100 grams from the brush in this motion!
- Resist temptation to add more water after you've sprinkled for about five to six times. The idea is now that you want to saturate the water with soap. Adding more water at this stage would just dilute what you have, and introduce more and more air into the mix. So instead just keep on gently rotating, folding, and pumping.
- The proto-lather should be thick and very soapy, almost like a thin shaving cream. Continue building elsewhere; run a finger around the soap bowl to pick up all the proto-lather if you want.
- Repeat one or two more times to see if you can reach the desired consistency.
The entire process will take you about 3 to 4 minutes. Yes, that's long, and no, it isn't a 3-second spin. You will probably have picked up sufficient soap for five very royal passes. However, once you have done this you can take shortcuts, like leaving more moisture in the brush, and loading less. The trick, if there is one, is not to rush things, and to try and keep the amount of water down. But not so down that you can't dissolve any soap. The brush still should be fairly dry, however, which in this case means: tiny clumps of hairs. Remember that you want to dissolve soap, not scrape it off. A boar brush is tougher than a badger, and will mechanically abrade the soap surface too, hence the reason that many report improvements when switching. Soft brushes need more time. Finally, the brush itself 'wants' some lather too, so don't be too stingy with the soap. A large loft will need more loading than a small loft.
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Cymric did a great job posting the details out
The only thing I can add is that I soak the brush in my bowl and put a layer of warm water over my puck of Cade and soak them both for about 5 minutes. I then wring the brush dry and give a few shakes. You want a dry brush and then I dump the water off the soap at the last minute just before putting the brush to it. Load for a minute or more. You'll get the feel eventually. Then I just add a drop at a time. It can take a while to get it to where I have it in the photo's, but after 2 weeks of doing it I was able to speed it up and cut the time in half.
After I conquered Cade, I've found I can lather just about anything with the same results!!
Good luck and PM if you have any questions in the future.
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Thanks again for all of the replies. This morning I soaked the brush in hot water and put a few ounces on the puck to soak it while I was in the shower. I then dumped the water off the soap and really dried out the brush, took my time with the lather and...it was OK. Not great, but better. Got a good first pass but the second was still weak. I have hope, Cade is going to work out. I just wish it had more scent, I seem to have gotten one of the ones that have almost none.
Undoubtedly. You need WATER! What you did right now was creating a thin layer of wet paste on top of the soap, and scraping that off with the brush. Some soaps can be loaded that way: from personal experience I know that Tabac is one of them. Then I got a puck of TOBS Sandalwood which was hard as a rock and resisted softening even if I left water on there for half an hour or so. Wilkinson in the blue tub proved equally resistent. Apparently Cade is somewhere in between.
The first key is, I repeat, water. Not too little so that the soap remains hard and you can't pick up sufficient product. Not too much so that you create sudsy crap. I find that the optimum is far closer to the dry end of things. The second key is time. The brush is loaded through dissolution. As the concentration of soap in the water in the brush increases, the dissolution will slow down. It will go on, but requires more time and effort. Theoretically you could eat up the entire cake of soap thus raising the amount of water in it by a fraction of a percent, but that requires a mill at these low concentrations. So don't worry that you 'overload' on soap. The amount of water that you added is the limiting factor.
I think that if you lather up correctly, you'll have plenty of strong juniper floating around in the bathroom...
I am surprised to hear this
I don't know if water quality makes a difference with this soap (I always use filtered or distilled)
Agree. I truly don't get it. I can get amazing lather in 10 seconds or less.
Nice tips guys. I managed to improve my lather a bit today. I still couldn't get my lather to look as shiny as bluemantra's, but I did manage to get some nice peaks.
Once I move my lather to my bowl and start adding water drop by drop, how do I know I've added enough water?
Once I move my lather to my bowl and start adding water drop by drop, how do I know I've added enough water?
I didn't start getting good lathers with CADE until I got rid of the aluminum bowl it came in. Didn't throw it away, put the soap in a Glad bowl and lathered on the puck. Worked great then. Badger or boar it didn't matter.
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