What did you use when you where in HS?

[mikey]

well, i guess i just have an extremely coarse and tough beard. the stubble after one day is like sandpaper and i have found that i get a better shave if i skip a day (longer whiskers for the blade to get a better grip???). if i shave everyday with a de it seems like all i am doing is polishing the blade with my sandpaper stubble. i can't imagine getting two weeks out of 1 gilette cartridge let alone a full month.

thanks,
mike

[javyn]

I used a drugstore electric shaver that pulled my peach fuzz out, until I graduated to a Sensor Excel and canned foam my Senior year when I actually started to grow a beard.

[fprintf]

hello all,

i find the stats from gilette's website a bit suspect.

a question for those of you who are using gilette cartridges: are you really getting a month's worth of shaves out of just one cartridge.

Yep, I get about 4 weeks worth. Granted the last week or so is really quite rough, not so much from irritation as from the feeling that the hair is being pulled out rather than cut off. That is when I know it is time to change. I basically shave until the lubricant strip is almost worn off.

edit: I have a pretty coarse beard also. Nothing like peach fuzz here. The hair on my head, and pretty much all over is very coarse to match.

[DEF]

I'm a bit late to the party here, but through HS I used a Gillette Atra and canned Colgate foam. (My A/S balm was Oxy 10. ) The first time I tried gel was as a college freshman; we had back-to-school hospitality packs in the dorms that contained a small can of Edge. A good investment on their part; I used Edge right up until late last year.

[wenestvedt]

Around age 15 (junior year I think) I stole one of my sister's pink disposable Bic razors and used bar soap -- in the shower, so at least I had hot water. Later I think I moved "up" to shaving at the sink with the same crude tools.

One birthday during high school I was given a Braun rechargeable electric razor. I tried it once or twice and the hair-pulling was so cruel that I, like so many others, stashed it in a drawer. Come to think of it, I think it's down on my workbench somewhere!

Sometime in college I switched from bar soap to green oozy gel in a can, but then went over to the striped can of foam after I got married (and my wife was willing to get it at the store for me).

[BklynBoy]

I started with a Norelco rotary razor. It was a Bar Mitzvah gift that I received at 13 but didn't get to use until I grew my first peach fuzz at 16. I used the Norelco through college, and then when I got my first job and began to travel on business, I got tired of lugging the electric along and switched to a Gilette DE (the one with the black handle circa 1976) and cheap foam.

Along the way, I moved from the DE to disposables, Trac II's and Sensors. Somewhere along the way I used one of those cartridge systems with the single long blade that was unwound from a spool. 6 weeks ago I went back to a DE, this time a Merkur Progress.

On the shaving cream side, I moved from whatever foam was on sale to Gel and then about 10 years ago to Kiss My Face (primarily because the tube was lighter in my shave bag than the can of gel , but came to like KMF very much

I never used much after shave, because I did not like the burn. About three years ago I started using Boucheron after shave balm (which costs 4 times as much as the Proraso I am using since learning of it here)

[EL Alamein]

Well, for me it was the early eighties and I was about 12 or 13. The beard started early and came in heavy and hard. Dad and Mom weren’t together anymore but he left behind an Atra and a Trac 2. I tried them both but that didn’t seem to get me close enough. I can still remember Mom telling me I was still stubbly when I gave her a kiss goodbye on the cheek. Like most boys I had no idea regarding technique at the time and did only a “with the grain pass” on my upper face and an against the grain on my throat. Well, in attempt to get closer I received an electric Ronson foil razor for Christmas that year, I still have it because it has this neat little side burn trimmer. I graduated to a Braun shortly thereafter in the hopes that it performed better than it’s cheaper cousin. My experience was such: the electric left me baby smooth for exactly one hour and then I looked and felt like I needed a shave again. Oddly enough after the electric experience and returning to a blade I have never again been able to do an against the grain pass on my throat without drawing blood. It matters not what instrument I use or even the lightest of touches it’s near impossible because the stubble is so hard.

I moved to an old DE that I found in storage, which must have been dad’s as a young man. It was a Personna and I still have it as a back up in my Dopp. I used it with the Wilkinson sword razors of the day but still not close enough using my old technique.

Finally, I remember quite clearly the day I made up my mind to try a straight. I was at my best friend’s house and his Dad happened to be shaving (not with a straight mind you). I was telling my friend about how nothing seemed to get me close enough and his Dad popped his head out of the bathroom still with shaving cream on half of his face, an Atra in his right hand and suggested I try a straight razor. I was floored as I didn’t think they were even made anymore but the idea grabbed. Well, I located one at a Barber supply and at first did not immediately figure out how to use it. Then about a week later I saw a documentary on WW1 and in the BW footage they showed a soldier shaving with a straight in the trenches. I studied him closely and that unlocked the key in my mind. I marched into the bathroom and shaved my cheeks baby smooth. Then I realized that I needed to work my way up to my full face and did so in a few weeks. For the next 10 years I shaved with the same razor every day, stropping and honing as needed. I learned to hone from my barber and have continually improved my technique and tools since. Think of all the money I saved in college!

I have tried other instruments such as disposables and the Mach 3 but I have always come back to the straight and have used one for the better part of the last 22 years. I pretty much always shaved with Noxzema skin cream or the Conk soap and a Conk brush (pure badger). This was until I discovered the English creams and soaps years on. I have been expanding my knowledge ever since. It’s really one of the only luxuries that men get to indulge in so I take full advantage.

Sorry for the long winded approach but this kind of took me down memory lane. Hope you enjoyed the ride.

Chris

[Bargepole]

Late to the party, too, but just discovered this thread. O tempora! O mores! My father's old nanny gave me a shaving kit-in-a-box for Christmas when I was 14 and I remember the excitement ("I'm a man! I'm a man!") of that first shave; the cold striking against my bedroom windows, the brand-new, rather hideous, moulded-white-plastic "unit" (mirror, shelf, medicine cabinet) above my bedroom basin... the smell of the Palmolive shave cream, the tremulous fitting of the Gillette blade into the non-adjustable El Cheapo DE, the scritch of the boarbristlebrush on my incipient peachfuzz, the shave, the blood ("I really AM a man! I just CUT MYSELF SHAVING!"), the sneaking across the landing to my parents' bedroom to steal some of Dad's Old Spice . . . them days . . . give it a name . . .

Then of course GGPAD* kicked in. Not just every new razor that came onto the market in that late 60s explosion of bogus innovation -- starting with the lethal and lamentable Techmatic. Everything. Before long it was Habit Rouge shaving cream and Habit Rouge Dry** cologne, something called Nine Flags Cologne (there were nine different ones and I can still smell them all in my mind's nose -- Ireland: Green Moss; Sweden: Wild Spruce etc). By the time I went to University I had a whole box of stuff to take with me. I loved it. Still do. But the thing that sticks in my mind is when I was 16 a school friend, John Wild, said to me "My mother was moaning at me today. She said why couldn't I be look you. She said you're always perfectly shaved..." A simple compliment but one which meant a lot. What an odd kid I must have been.

---
Michael

*General Grooming Product Acquisition Disorder
** In a beautiful red flask, a much... er, dryer accord than the current rather over-Oriental version.

[bernards66]

Ah, Michael, I suspect that quite a few of us were, "odd kids" (chuckle ). Wonderful little piece you wrote there, I thoroughly enjoyed it. And just what IS that turn of the century Guerlain cologne that you said you have? Tell me more.
Regards,
Gordon

[styptic screams]

Nice memories, Bargepole!

I started HS during the year of the TV Special SS!

I used Super Speeds and tube brushless' lathers almost exclusively until G stopped SS production in the 70's -- then I mostly went with SA's.

[Stauff]

In HS I used Nivea or Vichy goo and a sensor. May those days never come back.

[Bargepole]

Wonderful little piece you wrote there, I thoroughly enjoyed it. And just what IS that turn of the century Guerlain cologne that you said you have? Tell me more.
Regards,
Gordon

Well thank you Gordon. The Guerlain is called Eau de l'Hegemonienne and its most notable characteristic is the sheer weight of ambergris. It's basically a whale in a bottle. I first encountered it via a man called Roja Dove, who was Professeur des Parfums at Guerlain (and had the sense to get out a few years back when he saw the way things were going there). The accord was extraordinary, and, as some of the great perfumes can be, very moving. Roja had about 1/4 of an ounce of the stuff and that was basically it; but he gave me half of it and I sealed it away in the refrigerator with instructions that I was to be anointed with it on my deathbed so it would be the last thing I smelt before crossing to the palpable obscure.

Earlier this year, a woman I had been corresponding with emailed me to say she had read something I'd written -- in a book about things which we've lost -- about l'Hegemonienne and had managed to get an entire original bottle on eBay, and how could she be sure that it was the real thing. I said I could tell her instantly, so she brought it round to my rooms, I pulled the stopper, and, bless my soul, it was the stuff itself.

I told her she had a great treasure on her hands. "I'll give you some of it," she said, but I said, no, keep it all together and wear it with pride.

Well... a few weeks later she wrote me the most charming note saying she had decided that I should have it; she had smelt it, enjoyed finding it, but it wasn't as magical to her as it was to me. And sure enough 1/2 hour later I got a call from the Porters' Lodge saying "A lady has just come by and left something for you. [LONG PREGNANT PAUSE] We think it's perfume, sir."

And so it was. I don't know what the porters made of it -- I'm probably marked down forever now as practitioner of some nameless vice -- but it was one of the finest presents I've ever received.

A long post, I know; but you did ask . . .

[bernards66]

Michael, A quite incredible, and enchanting, tale. It must be something else, indeed. It's unlikely that, as into scent as I am, that I've ever smelled anything much like it, as no one has used real ambergris in those kind of quantities in my lifetime. Amazing that she found a whole bottle of it for sale on Ebay! So often I've read lists of the scents that some houses offered in the 19th c.; Guerlain, L T Piver, Ed. Pinaud, Gosnell, and Truefitt & Hill, and wished I could have checked them out. What was Ed. Pinaud's original Spanish Leather like, for example?.....sigh. Thanks for taking the time to respond in detail.
Regards,
Gordon

[Bargepole]

I'm told the Pinaud Spanish Leather was a pretty robust lavandine accord (a rougher, "scratchier" lavender hybrid which grows a little higher than e.g. Grasse lavande) -- you can get fairly close to it, I think, if you take the Santa Maria Novella Peau d'Espagne and imagine it turned down a couple of notches.

You're right about ambergris. And so many ingredients are being "banned" by the EU in their obsession with the most fatuous minutiae of "health and safety". Someone - Roudnitska? Ernst Daltroff? One of the great noses, anyway - once said "perfumery is a memory game". When the sods "reformulate" great classics, they are tampering with our memories. It's not only inelegant but very sad. (I just discovered T&H Rose cream is 'discontinued'. Damn damn damn.

Roses are red
Violets are blue
Use Edge Gel instead,
Big Brother's watching you.

Ho hum.

[bernards66]

Michael, The T&H Rose cream is discontinued in Britain ALSO?! Are you sure? I knew that T&H NA quit carrying it here, but it's hard to believe they'd discontinue it in England. Aren't the Rose scented creams quite popular with the English traditional shavers? Why would they just leave the field to Trumpers? And, what about their Sandalwood?...the other one they no longer offer here.

Ah, the SMN Spanish Leather turned down a few notches. I can imagine that....very nice. But, there are so many intriquing sounding scents on those old lists. How about 'Lord Palmerston's Bouquet' ( T&H ), 'Athenian Cologne Water ( Gosnell ). So many, really.
Regards,
Gordon