The "science" of shaving?

[Ouchmychin]

Excellent description of the science, notthe. The pleasure seems to be derived from the feeling of overdoing the amount of warm lather in the brush to start. Later, it needs to thin out some to let the blade cut closer. By that time the spaghetti is soft and very short.

[brothers]

In its normal state, your beard is a bit like thousands of pieces of dry spaghetti, with their lower ends embedded in a steak. Your job is to trim off the spaghetti ends that are showing, without ruining the steak - and, importantly, without even disturbing the embedded parts of the spaghetti, because even doing that would do too much damage to such a tender "steak".

Oiling the steak will help to prevent damage, but you still have a major problem, because as you know cutting spaghetti dry is always unreliable and rough. You have to have a way to soften the spaghetti.

(This is one of the reasons why old-time barbers used uncomfortably hot water in those soaking towels - they knew, though they didn't say it this way, that they were doing something like cooking spaghetti, and the first requirement for that is to use a lot of hot water.)

Of course we can't actually boil our "spaghetti" without ruining the steak - so we have to resort to other methods of forcing water to soak into it and soften it up. This is where all the soap-based or detergent-based products come in - they soften the beard by making it absorb water.



OK, maybe enough with the food metaphor... but shaving lather has at least three important characteristics:

- It forms a physical barrier between skin and blade (the reason that lather is thick and cushiony)

- It pulls more water into the whiskers (the reason that lather contains soap or detergent)

- It lubricates the skin (the reason that lather is slippery).

Different brands and kinds of products combine these capabilities in differing proportions; some lathers form a weak physical barrier but are extremely good at wetting the hair, some are very protective of the skin even though they're not all that slippery, and so on.

Using only an oil product would probably be a disaster for most men to shave with. But there's at least a chance for the oil method if you start by having a hot soapy face wash of some kind to soften the beard. The advantage of a great lather is that it gives all three characteristics in one product. Poor lather products are usually deficient in one of the three characteristics, perhaps because the makers of those products simply didn't know they had so many bases to cover.

Dave, I think you hit the nail on the head. That's what I like best about Noxzema!