Water Softening The Hard Way

I am beginning to receive shaving intelligence from my second obsession, brewing kombucha, in return for the acid-toner insight from shaving that fueled my interest in the tonic beverage initially. When drunk and applied topically, kombucha ameliorates all my little skin dings, by lightening pigmentation and exfoliating. I can actually feel it tightening up atrophic scars above and beyond the skin-shrinking I get from Asquith and Somerset Citrus and Ginger exfoliating soap.

Skin Food For Real?

Some Kombucha acids are not merely a "peel" in the cosmetic sense, but a connective tissue strengthener, like hyaluronic acid and glucosamine joint pills. I've experienced that effect directly in my knees, through consuming the beverage, and having taken the pills in the past. I know I've said otherwise about cosmetics, but I suspect this stuff might actually be feeding the skin when applied externally, in a way. Not really, but like the vitamin D shaving oil -- there's a biochemical pathway in the tissue already, and this one happens to be constructive of collagen.

Of course, I'm not a scientist, and I could be totally wrong. Inhibiting inflammation and promoting exfoliation are powerful enough interventions, and might be the only supports to the repair functions here. But it sure feels that way. At night, when I think of it, I've been soaking a cotton pad, putting it on my facial blems like Stridex on a zit, then taping the same pad to that hyperpigmented scar on my shin, which I gave to myself by putting pumpkin juice on a scab.

Marangoni Effect Revisited

There's a curious difference between freshly-brewed "nute" (super-sweet tea, the food of the kombucha culture) and nute reconstituted from refrigerated concentrate (as in southern style iced tea). Boiling removes gas from the liquid, and it doesn't come back right away. This happens because steam bubbles passing through the liquid receive other gasses dissolved in the liquid, and move them out, more readily than they can return through the cool surface boundary. It's about equilibrium interacting with the "colligative properties" of the liquid -- just like the Marangoni effect I suspect of mediating the irritation of my thin skin.

In kombucha, the refrigerated nute doesn't sink my pellicle ("mushroom, SCOBY") that floats on the surface of the brewing vessel, but fresh does. Surface tension stops the cellulose matrix and its contents in the first case, and lets it pass in the second. Only when CO2 has built up again, due to the fermentation action of the yeast in solution, will more fibers rise to the surface (like a Cap'n Crunch plastic submarine, propelled by tiny bubbles), and form a new mat. Sometimes the old mother will rise, too, after a couple days, if enough of its mass is populated by living organisms.

The pellicle is like the stratum corneum of a kombucha culture. There are a bunch of fools on the reddit forum telling people to throw it away at the start of every batch, because it's just dead garbage. But in a continuous brew, it creates the selective environment that allows carbonation and ethanol to remain concentrated in solution (enough to flavor it, not to get drunk), instead of evaporating. It helps keep oxygen out, so the yeast get to work sooner, and you don't have to wait three weeks. The importance obviously decreases when it sinks every time, so I guess that's where these clowns are coming from.

Like people with soft water have an easier time with lather, perhaps. I boiled some water in a pot before going to bed, and filled my sink with it in the morning to shave, after it had cooled. It was obviously still "hard" in the sense of containing lime, because I could see it clouding up the water! Traditionally, the boiling effect is explained as removing the "temporary hardness" of calcium hydrogencarbonate. (Chemistry: still my least favorite subject.) 

I think it might be less deep than that, though. I came back to the boundary effect through a brewers' post about degassing (actually, I think the brewer was a scientist -- let's not give brewers that much credit):

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn3408-oil-and-water-do-mix-after-all/

To see how my de-gassed, temporarily soft (?) water would perform, I used my most critical shaving kit: Williams, PUR-tech, and Mimi (RM2001), with the same well-worn Ming Shi Diamond blade. Skin condition was poor, following an ill-advised Weishi shave with no shim, so I was looking forward to a gentle shave. And, I got it! The hair didn't turn to jelly or anything, but it did seem relatively easy to cut. Like the keratin itself was made fragile, rather than the structure of the hair being inflated with something.

Not that I waited around for it to be waterlogged: I didn't want to push Williams to dryness. But it held up better than usual. I face lathered directly, and didn't need to pre-treat the skin with a preliminary emulsion. It was a thin layer on second pass, and just some crema to rub in on third, with my small (or classically normal-sized) brush, but that's all I needed. Not only did it not dissipate, it stayed noticeably slicker than usual, with not a single skip. I did my final rinsing with hard water, because they say that's what it's good for. (Also, I forgot to set aside some clean, preboiled water in a mug.)

The reward: unbroken skin. Just a little neck tingle with dilute Aqua Velva Musk. My skin did feel very dry and tight on drydown, albeit perfectly comfortable, so I went back and applied moisturizer.

I wonder if soft water is the key external condition that makes for a thick stratum corneum. It's pickle and jelly season, a good time to be boiling things in the evening, so I guess I'll keep it up for a week.