Thanks for continuing to reply. I will stop commenting soon as I don't want you to feel that I am hounding you. I am trying to close the gap in my understandings and perceptions when compared to your review. That may be largely due to meaning of a few key terms.Yes.
No. What I said is that the optimization process for CC involved six shaves. (I stopped with a precision of 4 with respect to the water-to-soap ratio, which is higher than my usual precision of 1, because of the lather performance and the fact that zeroing in more on the precise optimum for me would have hardly changed the optimum lather performance.) There is no predetermined amount of shaves for an optimization process. Sometimes it takes more shaves and sometimes it takes less shaves. I've gotten more efficient with optimization, so I'm somewhat quicker than I used to be. Nowadays, an optimization with around ten shaves is fairly normal for me.
Specifically the word airy was used more than once to describe the lather. That is practically unusable lather in my experience. But a condition that is rectified 100% of the time by using more product (again in my experience). Yet you are very confident that you are using the right amount of product in the final tests.
Second you state that you are optimizing lathers in just 6 attempts. I find it difficult to truly optimize a lather once a week/month. Much less be confident that I have arrived at the ideal process with a new soap in 6 attempts (especially if the initial lathers were a complete fail producing an airy lather).
But my perceptions are a lot less fine tuned than many members of the forum. In that while I know which soaps I like relatively speaking I could never rank order them. Even if forced to keep only five soaps it would not be the best performing ones but include a few more different from each other.