I jumped the gun a bit with the Personna blade and moved it up to the Super Speed, even though it is still quite sharp. The way the hair was softened yesterday, with Williams pre-shave and straight pumpkin juice, made it a little hard for the Rimei to catch hair at its lower natural pitch angle. Predicting less resistance from the hair again today, I anticipated the skin would be less at risk.
Half right, as usual. The burn from a splash of Florida Water was pretty significant on my neck. But what a shave! I've never before been able to repeat this hairy-kari: the hair just killing itself on the edge, cutting clean through without a tug. It happens often enough for me to understand that this is what people are talking about when they say, "Let the blade do the work." I wish they understood that shaving is quite a bit more work for some of us. (Besides the colloquialism being physically impossible.)
Today, however, I coulda (shoulda, woulda) stopped at one pass, as the hair was completely reduced by WTG. A little tip-blunting, ATG skim would have finished it, but I stuck with the three passes I've been using lately, and wound up over-exfoliated, with a weeper on my Adam's apple making a cameo appearance during the shave.
Right now, though, I couldn't care less about BBS or exfoliation. The hair, the hair! I must have the hair! The third, forgotten Stygian witch is grasping around desperately in my head for answers.
Does Williams have special cuticle-deforming power, like baking soda, in its limited array of chemical additives? Pentasodium pentetate, tetrasodium etidronate. That's the simplest explanation. I'd have to review all the other soaps' ingredients. Well, rest assured, I'll be testing this with all other soaps going forward. (PdP, here I come!)
Or is it the dehydration effect, the same that makes it challenging for beginners to lather? Recollect the "Shave With Ivory" trick: face lather, rinse, re-apply lather. If you don't replenish the water content of the skin before you shave, simple soap lathers tend to dry out on your face. But I've taken care of that before the pumpkin juice arrives, in this routine: it's not like the hair would suck in the pumpkin juice due to dehydration.
Could the oil-less preparation be leaving the hair particularly receptive to juice? There would seem to be plenty of sebum present, still. It may be noteworthy that I've shifted the witch hazel to nighttime use, as the pumpkin came to the day. By chance, I jumped in the tub after one of my kids yesterday, and put Ivory to my head in wild west fashion, knowing I could rely on the pumpkin juice to fix me up afterward. It didn't seem to make pumpkin juice particularly effective, by any means.
Probably it's the combination of chelation, osmosis, and cleansing that allows Williams to unlock stubble to the pumpkin's magic.
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