I recieved this 30mm, Silvertip Firehouse Shave brush from Whipped Dog (below)
View attachment 383637
a few weeks ago, and have been evaluating it's performance against what I am used to. As you can see, it is quite beautiful, give or take for my choice of handle colors. Thought chartreuse was green, but it's snot, and the handle syles all look different with different plug widths (would have been made easier with a wider array of photographs for examples), but I'm not posting to discuss that. It is a wide brush which is densely packed with luxuriant bristles which look and feel like they should only perform better than the old brush which it would have replaced, which is the very narrow and thin black badger from Colonel Conk below:
View attachment 383636
This is the brush which I have been using since I began straight-razor shaving, and it gets a little thinner each time I use it from shedding a few bristles, despite the fact that I rinse it out carefully, hang it to drain upside-down, and I never press when I whisk it around in the bowl. Well, I did this all wrong the first month or two that I used it, but it still does this after several months of doing everything right. Despite the issue of being so thin, it still performs better by putting more soap on my face (and the difference is huge) than my dense and much bigger Silvertip brush. If somebody had told me that this would turn out to be so, I would not have believed them, but this has been my experience with Larry's (Whipped Dog) Silvertip brush, and I find it a little perplexing. I'm not slamming Larry here, and there is no apparent quality issue - I can't doubt that his very popular brushes are any less than the standard.
I also have, and have used a recent edition of the B&B Special (boar). The boar bristles are quite beautiful, and they can really lift your whiskers, but being so coarse they really aren't the best for picking up a lot of soap for transfer to your face.
The issue with my 30mm Silvertip brush (far as I can see it) is that I am not getting much of the soap which I can see is on the bristles transferred to my face. Whether it's the black badger or the silvertip which I am using, I swirl it around in the bowl for at least a minute, never pressing, and wetting the bristles good about three times (this is how I measure the appropriate amount of water to avoid making the soap to dry or runny - wet once, swirl a few times, repeat the process twice and then go for a minute). The soap covers over a half inch of the outside of my fat, silvertip brush with wet soap, but the ends of it's bristles on my face never put an adequate amount on my face. It seems to just soak back into the bristles, which won't let go of it! I still have to pick bristles from my CC black badger bristles out of my soap puck when it's used, but I currently don't have anything that performs better for putting the soap where I need it.
Has anyone else had this experience? If so, what do you think are the critical factors which caused this? Is it the width of the brush, the density of the bristles, or other properties (silvertip vs black badger) that make the difference in making a brush actually useful, as opposed to just beautiful? Would my silvertip experience have been different with a narrower brush?
View attachment 383637
a few weeks ago, and have been evaluating it's performance against what I am used to. As you can see, it is quite beautiful, give or take for my choice of handle colors. Thought chartreuse was green, but it's snot, and the handle syles all look different with different plug widths (would have been made easier with a wider array of photographs for examples), but I'm not posting to discuss that. It is a wide brush which is densely packed with luxuriant bristles which look and feel like they should only perform better than the old brush which it would have replaced, which is the very narrow and thin black badger from Colonel Conk below:
View attachment 383636
This is the brush which I have been using since I began straight-razor shaving, and it gets a little thinner each time I use it from shedding a few bristles, despite the fact that I rinse it out carefully, hang it to drain upside-down, and I never press when I whisk it around in the bowl. Well, I did this all wrong the first month or two that I used it, but it still does this after several months of doing everything right. Despite the issue of being so thin, it still performs better by putting more soap on my face (and the difference is huge) than my dense and much bigger Silvertip brush. If somebody had told me that this would turn out to be so, I would not have believed them, but this has been my experience with Larry's (Whipped Dog) Silvertip brush, and I find it a little perplexing. I'm not slamming Larry here, and there is no apparent quality issue - I can't doubt that his very popular brushes are any less than the standard.
I also have, and have used a recent edition of the B&B Special (boar). The boar bristles are quite beautiful, and they can really lift your whiskers, but being so coarse they really aren't the best for picking up a lot of soap for transfer to your face.
The issue with my 30mm Silvertip brush (far as I can see it) is that I am not getting much of the soap which I can see is on the bristles transferred to my face. Whether it's the black badger or the silvertip which I am using, I swirl it around in the bowl for at least a minute, never pressing, and wetting the bristles good about three times (this is how I measure the appropriate amount of water to avoid making the soap to dry or runny - wet once, swirl a few times, repeat the process twice and then go for a minute). The soap covers over a half inch of the outside of my fat, silvertip brush with wet soap, but the ends of it's bristles on my face never put an adequate amount on my face. It seems to just soak back into the bristles, which won't let go of it! I still have to pick bristles from my CC black badger bristles out of my soap puck when it's used, but I currently don't have anything that performs better for putting the soap where I need it.
Has anyone else had this experience? If so, what do you think are the critical factors which caused this? Is it the width of the brush, the density of the bristles, or other properties (silvertip vs black badger) that make the difference in making a brush actually useful, as opposed to just beautiful? Would my silvertip experience have been different with a narrower brush?
Last edited:
I guess I 'll use this as a desktop background
