Hey everyone, I'm relatively new to the forum (as a member, I've been reading posts here for months), and I've been DE shaving for a bit over 2 months now and have loved every minute of it. For any of you interested, I'll briefly introduce myself and then run through my shaving history. I'm sure that most of you don't care, and I do not begrudge you for that in the slightest, you're more than welcome to stop reading right here. I thank you for opening the post to begin with though! For the rest of you that are bored and want a bit of reading to put you to sleep, thanks for being so welcoming to the community, I have already had conversations with several of you, and I am looking forward to learning much more from all of you, sharing opinions and discoveries back and forth with you, and inviting even newer members than myself to the forum. So buckle up and here we go!
My name is Henry, and I'm an American grad student of Finnish and Italian ancestry that is conducting grad studies in the field of immunobiology in Germany. I'm an avid outdoorsman, hobbiest knifemaker, a proud Yooper (for those of you unfamiliar with the term, it means I'm from the Upper Peninsula, though I'm sure google could have told you that), and I will soon be starting a research project in an Ebola laboratory in Hamburg. Enough about me though, this is a shaving forum, not a talk about Henry forum, let's get to the razors!
My first razor (that I remember at least) was a Gillette Fusion 5 (could've been a Fusion 5 Proglide, but if you put a gun to my head and made me choose, I would say I think it was just the plain Fusion 5) that I got as a birthday present quite a while back. Let me tell you, I hated the thing, I got irritation almost every shave, particularly on my neck and under my jaw (I'd assume because there was an overabundance of blades, and the fact that I had to go over each area so many times to get it smooth that each area of my face probably had 25-40 blades pass over it each shave depending on what part of my face it was). And the cost of replacing the cartridges meant that I ended up using each cartridge for many months at a time to try to save money.
Then probably my senior year of high school, I was fed up with the Gillette and bought myself a 12 pack of Wilkinson Sword disposable razors for about $9 or $10. The difference between the Gillette Fusion and the Wilkinson Sword disposables was night and day, and not in the way you'd probably expect. The Wilkinson's cut down my irritation by at least 50% from day 1! Not to mention the fact that I only had to do a with the grain and against the grain to get pretty darn smooth, as opposed to my customary 5-8 passes (in seemingly every direction) with the Fusion! Furthermore, for whatever reason, whereas I could feel the Fusion cartridges dulling after a few weeks or a month of shaving, and then powering through a few more months of less than comfortable shaves, I felt that the Wilkinson disposables stayed moderately sharp for ages. I would occasionally "strop" them by sliding them the opposite direction on my forearm maybe every other shave, and I did actually strop them on a belt about once a month, which I know is crazy to do with a $0.07 disposable, but what can I say, I was (and still am) a poor student. In any case, once I went 13 months on one disposable Wilkinson Sword razor just to say I did, and to be honest I could've gone longer but I figured there was no point. Well, here we are, I think about 7 years since the switch to the Fusion to the Wilkinsons, and I think I've still got 2 of the original 12 pack I initially bought left.
Just to briefly mention what shaving creams and aftershave I used from the time I started shaving until "The DE Revolution" (which was like I said at the beginning, a bit more than 2 months ago now), I always used literally the cheapest or most discounted shaving foam I could find. Sometimes if Barbasol was on sale, that was what I got, sometimes I got store brands, and here in Germany I was using "Pure and Basic Shaving Foam" (the brand name Pure and Basic pretty much says it all). In regards to aftershave, I started off with Aqua Velva Ice Blue and that was my exclusive aftershave until I discovered Pinaud Clubman when I think I was a sophomore in my undergrad, maybe a junior, which was 3-4 years ago. From that time, that was all I used until the DE Revolution.
Fast forward to perhaps four months ago, and we have Henry, bored out of his skull in the laboratory waiting for a PCR reaction to finish so I could continue with the experiment, when all of a sudden I had a DE shaving video pop up in my Youtube recommended list. Why? I don't know, I assume I was watching a knife making video, or something about traditional Finnish axes, but alas, I clicked the video. Well, as they say, one thing led to another, I found this forum and started reading reviews of all the products that seemed cool to me. I also needed justification to buy any of it, since I am an absolutely broke grad student, but that was pretty easy to take care of. My justification is that other than a few football scarves of Borussia Mönchengladbach (the German club I've supported for years), I literally hadn't bought any souvenirs in my time here in Germany, and I figured I should get something to commemorate my time here. Well, Solingen is pretty close to where I study, and my student public transit pass even covers the trains and buses to there for free, so I've been there a couple times (again, as a knifemaker, that was a pretty big attraction to me), and I had seen that Merkur of Solingen razors were almost universally praised, so voilá, there was my justification for buying a DE razor (also, when I said that 50% of the irritation went away from switching from the Fusion to the disposables, the other 50% never did go away, on my neck particularly, no matter what I tried, so I figured if nothing else, the DE might actually help with it). I got the Merkur 33C, and also bought a small assortment of soaps to go along with the Háttric aftershave I had already been using with the Wilkinson disposables here. The rest, they say, is history, I've gotten more and more into DE wetshaving, bought more products than I should have, have consistently gotten comfortable, smooth, and irritation free shaves, bit the bullet and made an account here after reading the forum for months already, and now am writing this introduction of myself.
Now we embark on the next chapter, further improving my shaving ability, continuing to find new interesting products, encouraging others to join this way of shaving, and thanking all of you for the knowledge and encouragement you bring to the table.
So for any of you crazy enough to make it to the end, I salute you, and thank you for welcoming me to the B&B community as others already have. I hope to be a valuable and helpful member as you all are in the future!
My name is Henry, and I'm an American grad student of Finnish and Italian ancestry that is conducting grad studies in the field of immunobiology in Germany. I'm an avid outdoorsman, hobbiest knifemaker, a proud Yooper (for those of you unfamiliar with the term, it means I'm from the Upper Peninsula, though I'm sure google could have told you that), and I will soon be starting a research project in an Ebola laboratory in Hamburg. Enough about me though, this is a shaving forum, not a talk about Henry forum, let's get to the razors!
My first razor (that I remember at least) was a Gillette Fusion 5 (could've been a Fusion 5 Proglide, but if you put a gun to my head and made me choose, I would say I think it was just the plain Fusion 5) that I got as a birthday present quite a while back. Let me tell you, I hated the thing, I got irritation almost every shave, particularly on my neck and under my jaw (I'd assume because there was an overabundance of blades, and the fact that I had to go over each area so many times to get it smooth that each area of my face probably had 25-40 blades pass over it each shave depending on what part of my face it was). And the cost of replacing the cartridges meant that I ended up using each cartridge for many months at a time to try to save money.
Then probably my senior year of high school, I was fed up with the Gillette and bought myself a 12 pack of Wilkinson Sword disposable razors for about $9 or $10. The difference between the Gillette Fusion and the Wilkinson Sword disposables was night and day, and not in the way you'd probably expect. The Wilkinson's cut down my irritation by at least 50% from day 1! Not to mention the fact that I only had to do a with the grain and against the grain to get pretty darn smooth, as opposed to my customary 5-8 passes (in seemingly every direction) with the Fusion! Furthermore, for whatever reason, whereas I could feel the Fusion cartridges dulling after a few weeks or a month of shaving, and then powering through a few more months of less than comfortable shaves, I felt that the Wilkinson disposables stayed moderately sharp for ages. I would occasionally "strop" them by sliding them the opposite direction on my forearm maybe every other shave, and I did actually strop them on a belt about once a month, which I know is crazy to do with a $0.07 disposable, but what can I say, I was (and still am) a poor student. In any case, once I went 13 months on one disposable Wilkinson Sword razor just to say I did, and to be honest I could've gone longer but I figured there was no point. Well, here we are, I think about 7 years since the switch to the Fusion to the Wilkinsons, and I think I've still got 2 of the original 12 pack I initially bought left.
Just to briefly mention what shaving creams and aftershave I used from the time I started shaving until "The DE Revolution" (which was like I said at the beginning, a bit more than 2 months ago now), I always used literally the cheapest or most discounted shaving foam I could find. Sometimes if Barbasol was on sale, that was what I got, sometimes I got store brands, and here in Germany I was using "Pure and Basic Shaving Foam" (the brand name Pure and Basic pretty much says it all). In regards to aftershave, I started off with Aqua Velva Ice Blue and that was my exclusive aftershave until I discovered Pinaud Clubman when I think I was a sophomore in my undergrad, maybe a junior, which was 3-4 years ago. From that time, that was all I used until the DE Revolution.
Fast forward to perhaps four months ago, and we have Henry, bored out of his skull in the laboratory waiting for a PCR reaction to finish so I could continue with the experiment, when all of a sudden I had a DE shaving video pop up in my Youtube recommended list. Why? I don't know, I assume I was watching a knife making video, or something about traditional Finnish axes, but alas, I clicked the video. Well, as they say, one thing led to another, I found this forum and started reading reviews of all the products that seemed cool to me. I also needed justification to buy any of it, since I am an absolutely broke grad student, but that was pretty easy to take care of. My justification is that other than a few football scarves of Borussia Mönchengladbach (the German club I've supported for years), I literally hadn't bought any souvenirs in my time here in Germany, and I figured I should get something to commemorate my time here. Well, Solingen is pretty close to where I study, and my student public transit pass even covers the trains and buses to there for free, so I've been there a couple times (again, as a knifemaker, that was a pretty big attraction to me), and I had seen that Merkur of Solingen razors were almost universally praised, so voilá, there was my justification for buying a DE razor (also, when I said that 50% of the irritation went away from switching from the Fusion to the disposables, the other 50% never did go away, on my neck particularly, no matter what I tried, so I figured if nothing else, the DE might actually help with it). I got the Merkur 33C, and also bought a small assortment of soaps to go along with the Háttric aftershave I had already been using with the Wilkinson disposables here. The rest, they say, is history, I've gotten more and more into DE wetshaving, bought more products than I should have, have consistently gotten comfortable, smooth, and irritation free shaves, bit the bullet and made an account here after reading the forum for months already, and now am writing this introduction of myself.
Now we embark on the next chapter, further improving my shaving ability, continuing to find new interesting products, encouraging others to join this way of shaving, and thanking all of you for the knowledge and encouragement you bring to the table.
So for any of you crazy enough to make it to the end, I salute you, and thank you for welcoming me to the B&B community as others already have. I hope to be a valuable and helpful member as you all are in the future!
