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Trouble spot: neck hollows

Hey everybody
I have been shaving I intermittently with straights for about a year. I am now able to get a very nice shave on my face including ATG passes with no blood. The area that continues to be an ongoing struggle for me is my neck. Particularly my deep hollows which cause awkward angles leading to a very difficult straight shaving experience. The majority of videos of straight razor shaves are guys with beefy necks and no hallows. Anybody have suggestions how to work these tricky angles? Anybody have any good video suggestions of people shaving with pronounced neck hollows?
 
I am struggling with that as well...

Most of my skin I can slide to a flatter place near / on my face, however the right side has this one place that I just can't seem to do anything with.

What I'm going to try next is to gather the skin on either side of it in sort of a large pinch, forcing the depth of the hollow to bulge upwards, and gently shave the top of the bulge - there's got to be more than one way to skin this whisker.
 
The majority of videos of straight razor shaves are guys with beefy necks and no hallows. Anybody have suggestions how to work these tricky angles? Anybody have any good video suggestions of people shaving with pronounced neck hollows?
My straight razor hasn't arrived yet, but while shaving (with a cartridge) yesterday I was sort of analyzing what I was doing to imagine how to approach different areas with a straight. Thinking about that made me realize the same thing. Most videos DO feature guys with necks that are umm, more filled in... What about us with skinny necks? there's some tricky angles in there to go along with the neck hollows I also have a pronounced Adam's apple.
 
I'm not blessed with a skinny neck, but in the tricky concave parts of my face I use the heal. That is probably how I would approach a spot like that. YMMV.

I'll confirm for certain if I ever lose the weight the doctors keep telling me I should.
 
Besides trying to get the area to bulge, have you tried gently stretching the skin out of the hollow, to a more shavable surface? Usually neck skin is quite elastic.
 
I've only been straight shaving for a few months, but have been trying an "opposite hand pass" on my neck. I do the standard right hand, right side / left hand, left side pass WTG. Then, when I do XTG on my face (can't seem to get close to XTG on my neck), I do another WTG pass on my neck using opposite hands. This sems to put the blade at a different angle and uses different sections of the blade than the first pass.

Results from trying this have been noticeably better. But I do have to watch how far around the sides I try to take it. At the extreme you are using only the heel and doing so from a strange viewing angle...
 

steveclarkus

Goose Poop Connoisseur
I’ve had the same problem with just one small area on my neck. I started reaching around the back of my neck with my off hand and stretching the skin and problem solved.
 
So that’s a negative on the pinch method- trying to keep a bunch of skin pinched for shaving is a lot scarier / slipperier when that skin is covered in lather...
 
So that’s a negative on the pinch method- trying to keep a bunch of skin pinched for shaving is a lot scarier / slipperier when that skin is covered in lather...
If the hollow is on your neck between your throat and jugular, I saw a video of a guy that didn't tilt his head back very much so the throat doesn't jut out and then he pulled his neck skin to the side (away from the throat) which seems to have given him a pretty flat surface to work with....

If that wasn't a run-on sentence, I don't know what is.

I'm going to go do my first straight razor shave in a few minutes, so I'm not going to mess with that area just yet. I'll have to leave that for someone else to try out for now :001_302:
 
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@Animag771 that sounds interesting and I will give it a try. Strategy will work on the WTG neck pass where I use my right hand for right side and left hand for left side. Won’t work for my ATG pass where I use a cross handed approach (right hand for left side). Will let you know how it goes.
 
@Animag771 that sounds interesting and I will give it a try. Strategy will work on the WTG neck pass where I use my right hand for right side and left hand for left side. Won’t work for my ATG pass where I use a cross handed approach (right hand for left side). Will let you know how it goes.
Awesome! I'd appreciate the feedback. I just finished my first straight razor shave and I could use all the tips I can get.
 
I'm about six months into using straights, and my neck is still challenging. I have the neck hollows like some of you on here, and there is no way I could do the North/South, South/North passes that you see some people use on youtube. I use a combination of skin stretching, head craning, and using the heel of the blade in the hollow areas. This usually gets me a close comfortable shave on the neck and a bbs everywhere else. I can live with that.
 
About 8 months into straight shaving here and I would count myself of the skinnier necked variety with hollows either side of my adams apple. I've had a lot of success with stretching the area down and backwards from the adams apple initially. Lately I find that with practice and more control I use either the heel or toe of the blade more for problem areas like the neck hollows or side of mouth (as someone already mentioned) and stretching is becoming less necessary.
 
About 8 months into straight shaving here and I would count myself of the skinnier necked variety with hollows either side of my adams apple. I've had a lot of success with stretching the area down and backwards from the adams apple initially. Lately I find that with practice and more control I use either the heel or toe of the blade more for problem areas like the neck hollows or side of mouth (as someone already mentioned) and stretching is becoming less necessary.
It works!! I've been doing this myself and using the toe of the blade. It seems to work pretty well. I haven't cut myself there yet and the shave is pretty close for the amount of pactice I have.
 
Checkout this Youtube channel:
Kai Triska

Kai is fun to watch shave with a straight. I have started copying his technique recently and my shaves are getting better even on the neck hollows.
 
This was a huge problem for me when I was just starting out and almost made me give it up at one point. I just couldn't imagine a universe in which I could shave my neck with a straight razor. I'm 6'3 and weigh 167 pounds. I have a very angular jawline and at least two deep hollows on both sides of my neck.

I think the thing that worked best for me was to stop worrying about it. I just kept a DE close by and continued shaving with the straight razor. At the end of the first pass, if there was lather still in those hollows, I just shaved them with a DE and didn't think too much about it.

Ironically, the less I thought about it and worried about it, the more successful I became, gradually. One day I noticed that I had shaved the neck without using the DE for something like 5 shaves in a row. And I did it, essentially, by not trying to do it! Just continuing to shave the area without stressing over it led me to make small, almost imperceptible changes in technique that I didn't even plan.

Worked for me.
 
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