Welcome Back

...to that same old soap that you laughed about...

I smell like the 1970s today, after perfect shave trial #4. Attempting to compress the hydration time back to normal scale, I brought a glycerin bar back into the routine, after an absence of nearly three years. As you have probably gathered by now, my skin reacts poorly to glycerin soap, swelling too rapidly, even painfully. I have oily skin, and presumably enough moisture already. But I liked the way preshave oil handled two preshave applications of croap, allowing it to penetrate all the way to my nerve endings, but not really harming me. It bought the hair time to really fill with water, making it longer, which seems to be the difference between BBS and DFS for me.

So today I reversed the conventional sequence, and did a brief oil cleanse BEFORE an additional glycerine soap preshave wash, and only applied the KMF-VDH to shave on. I guessed correctly with respect to my skin: it just reached the depth of the nerves. And three passes got pretty much every hair on my face. That is, it was an effective preshave.

I was disappointed to see so much shadow afterwards, though. Hair was palpable everywhere, rubbing against the grain. Worse, the damage to my skin was visible as chipping. (Yesterday was just a gentle, two-pass shave, so definitely not residual.)

Glycerin makes water wetter, but affects hair and skin differentially. Recalling the membrane channels that glycerin opens, it seems reasonable to assume that hair does not have as many, if any. It is only susceptible to the paracellular pathway.

For skin, that means urea. For hair, it means baking soda.