Happily Ever After

It appears that all my shaves are going to be great from now on. (The End.) :)) I got back on the horse that cut my chin, Rapira. I know it isn't the test of sharp shaving that Feather would have been, but I have to burn through the few remaining blades, just to be rid of them as soon as they tug. This exercise is enough to make me shave "blind" to tension alignment, at least in the sense to which I am accustomed.

Yesterday, I doctored my KMF-VdH croap with spinach and pumpkin juice, dripping them into the soap cup to wet the soap, and then some, maybe 10 ml total. The operation of melting the popsicles into my palm always makes me feel like a modern witch-doctor, preparing soot or clay to be smeared on some injury, magical or real. (Not far off, really.) It also occurred to me that the typical urban hipster, with his soft city water, might see a similarity to the horrible waste of soap known as "blooming." I dumped nothing, however, merely dipping the canopy of my brush that much less deeply in the basin, to account for the extra fluid.

If someone had held a gun to my head and told me to formulate a shaving cream, the contents of that brush after loading would probably have been it. (There was once an Indian shaving cream containing turmeric, high in oxalate.)  Oh, yes, it was as luxurious as could be imagined, and softened hair better than pumpkin juice alone; so that, in the end, I could easily take it with strokes approaching square ATG. The disappointment came after the shave, when I found that excessively moisturized skin had allowed wide areas above the jawline to miss. Solution: dry shave touch-ups.

Today, I gave the same treatment to my glycerin frankensoap, a microwave mix of PPF and Whoos The Man, in proportions I cannot recall, and the results were very interesting. Here, the hair was not particularly softened, but well erected, more in the manner of PdP. The feel of the lather on skin was even more surprising: completely tolerable. No irritation, no sense of the SC being broken down. Furthermore, it was possibly the richest lather I've ever made, with a sheen that put the croap's impression of luxury to shame.

The performance was none too remarkable, though, with a skippiness you'd normally only get from, say, a bath soap, or a watery preparation of something with extremely wide latitude, like Williams or KMF. But here, with all the glycerin, the lather was far from being thin. In fact, it felt sticky when hydrated, as the cushioning micelles of air seemed to be embedded in a gelatinous glycerin matrix. The hard hair required non-aggressive, traction-control attack vectors, and the missed hair this time was mostly under the jaw. I did the pickups on moisturizer, which was very slick and sort of the opposite of skippy, then finished with dilute aftershave.

Online commentators write of "glide" as separate from "slickness," but I've never gotten the distinction before. So it seems that, finally, my second novel botanical amendment for chelation has afforded me, a poor country boy with hard well water, a glimpse of city living. The values seem superficial, and the ways, technically deficient. Why do we keep sending all our money there?