I just tried Calani soap for the first time tonight. I bought a puck of the Gentleman scent from Royalshave. The Gentleman scent is described as "woody tones of moss and precious wood" on the Royalshave website. The scent for me is definitely above average. It's unique and it's my type of scent. I just received a new (to me) Old Spice mug today in the mail so I crammed the puck of Calani into that mug. It's a soft but dry soap... it fit a little tight in the OS mug but it was very squishable.... so I just jammed it down in there. I used my Simpson Emperor 3 two band super brush and whipped up a lather in my G20 scuttle. I loaded my brush for about 60 seconds and then built the lather in my scuttle, adding tiny amounts of water slowly. The lather started out very creamy and thick, but a bit dry in hindsight. No bubbles. The lather did not hold up however and broke down somewhat by the start of my third pass. It seemed seemed to lighten up and lose its density.... however I still had enough for a very good 4 pass shave with touchups. I think a few adustments will help in the future to make the lather hold up for the entire shave. I think I squeezed out too much water from my brush prior to loading.... since it seemed to load very dry. It's a soft soap so I did not put any water on the soap prior to loading.... and I don't think I need to.... I think I maybe just need to have a little more water in the brush when I load. The scent alone to me is worth keeping with this soap.... but I have a feeling that the performance potential is very high for this soap as well. Calani is offered in many different aromas as well.
Yesterday I tried Klar Seifen soap for the first time as well. I had a slightly better experience using that soap compared to the Calani for the first time. Again, the scent is wonderful. I got the original or classic scent as opposed to the sport scent.... which from what I understand is the same scent, just subdued a bit. One of the other members here told me that he thought that it smelled like Rive Gauche cologne (which I love) and I must say that I agree with that opinion. The performance of this soap is excellent to incredible. It's what I would call a slight step down from my top performing soaps (Tabac, I Coloniali, and Irisch Moos). It's a harder soap compared to the Calani soap. I was a bit disappointed in the tin it came in. It was dented in two spots right out of the box and then when I took the soap out to see if I could push the dents out, the tin just sort of lost it's trueness overall because it's just so flimsy. For a $30+ dollar soap I would expect a little better quality packaging. At any rate, it's usable and it looks nice if you don't look too close at it.
I'm very impressed with these two German made soaps. I've got a bowl and puck of Dr. Dittmar on the way so I can try that one as well.... as well as a couple Semogue boar brushes. Those brushes will hopefully be nice lather building machines for all of the soaps I've been trying out lately.
Ben
Yesterday I tried Klar Seifen soap for the first time as well. I had a slightly better experience using that soap compared to the Calani for the first time. Again, the scent is wonderful. I got the original or classic scent as opposed to the sport scent.... which from what I understand is the same scent, just subdued a bit. One of the other members here told me that he thought that it smelled like Rive Gauche cologne (which I love) and I must say that I agree with that opinion. The performance of this soap is excellent to incredible. It's what I would call a slight step down from my top performing soaps (Tabac, I Coloniali, and Irisch Moos). It's a harder soap compared to the Calani soap. I was a bit disappointed in the tin it came in. It was dented in two spots right out of the box and then when I took the soap out to see if I could push the dents out, the tin just sort of lost it's trueness overall because it's just so flimsy. For a $30+ dollar soap I would expect a little better quality packaging. At any rate, it's usable and it looks nice if you don't look too close at it.
I'm very impressed with these two German made soaps. I've got a bowl and puck of Dr. Dittmar on the way so I can try that one as well.... as well as a couple Semogue boar brushes. Those brushes will hopefully be nice lather building machines for all of the soaps I've been trying out lately.
Ben
