Hi all! My name is Parham, I'm new to wet shaving (been learning for 3 months!) and I'm also completely blind.
I have been trying to learn how to improve my shave, and B&B has been a wonderful help because people mostly explain in text and rarely share images.
However, applying the lather you've built in a bowl to your face with a brush isn't something I've seen explained anywhere.
So, a bit of an explanation of what I have and what I know. I'm going to do this in excruciating detail, so that there are no misunderstandings, but also, so that I can give you a glimpse into my world, how I perceive things like lather, and how you can explain things to me:
I'm using a Henson medium. I have a muhle silvertip fiber, a Proraso White, Speick, and Castle Forbes. I've been experimenting on building a lather with them.
So far, building in the bowl is the best for me since I can feel the resistance of my brush moving in the lather. When I feel the resistance increase, and in the case of Castle Forbes, when my brush can almost stand up in the bowl by itself, I go for applying it.
For making the lather, the Marco method has been the best for me — it makes the cream very watery in the beginning, which means I can feel the quality of the lather as it hardens. So thanks @Marco for the extraordinary amount of written detail!
Now the problem I have.
I don't know if I'm applying the lather to my face correctly. English isn't my first language, so I'm not sure if I'm understanding the words like "swirling" or "splaying" and so on, so let me explain what I'm doing in very simple terms.
I have been trying to learn how to improve my shave, and B&B has been a wonderful help because people mostly explain in text and rarely share images.
However, applying the lather you've built in a bowl to your face with a brush isn't something I've seen explained anywhere.
So, a bit of an explanation of what I have and what I know. I'm going to do this in excruciating detail, so that there are no misunderstandings, but also, so that I can give you a glimpse into my world, how I perceive things like lather, and how you can explain things to me:
I'm using a Henson medium. I have a muhle silvertip fiber, a Proraso White, Speick, and Castle Forbes. I've been experimenting on building a lather with them.
So far, building in the bowl is the best for me since I can feel the resistance of my brush moving in the lather. When I feel the resistance increase, and in the case of Castle Forbes, when my brush can almost stand up in the bowl by itself, I go for applying it.
For making the lather, the Marco method has been the best for me — it makes the cream very watery in the beginning, which means I can feel the quality of the lather as it hardens. So thanks @Marco for the extraordinary amount of written detail!
Now the problem I have.
I don't know if I'm applying the lather to my face correctly. English isn't my first language, so I'm not sure if I'm understanding the words like "swirling" or "splaying" and so on, so let me explain what I'm doing in very simple terms.
- I put my brush in the same bowl I use for building my lather, fill it up with warm water, and let my brush soak for a minute, just for it to absorb water
- I take my brush out and put the handle on the sink so the water wouldn't drip out, and dump all the water out from the bowl
- Then, I put an appropriate amount of shaving cream in the bowl and go in circles with my brush like I'm stirring sugar in tea, or honey in lemon water... you get the point, haha
- Once in a while I move my brush up and down along the sides, or press the side of my brush against the side of the bowl, before I get back to going in circles
- I keep going in circles until I hear the sound of my swirling change, and until I feel my brush encountering resistance as I move it around
- At this point, I take my brush out, and I can feel with my other hand that it has loooots of lather all around it. So, I hold the handle toward the floor, with the tip of the bristles pointing toward the ceiling, and lay the shaft of the bristles against my right cheek. I pull the side of my brush down toward my jaw, and keep doing this top-to-bottom movement until I get to my ear
- Now, I move the brush to my left hand, and do the same to my left cheek. Note that I haven't turned the brush, so now the side I'm pressing against my face is the opposite side than I've used before
- Then, I switch to my right hand with the handle to the right and the tips of the bristles to the left, and use one of the remaining two sides of the shaft of the bristles to do the same motion under my chin and all the way to my adam's apple, from side to side, front to back
- When I get to my lips and the front of my chin, I just move the tips of my brush, left-right-left-right, with the bristles pointing toward me. I press a little bit so that some of the lather in my brush would transfer to my face
- At this point, I have a whole bunch of lather on my face, and this is where I imagine I'd want to go around and do things like "swirling' or "scrubbing" or "breaking the backbone' and all the confusing terms I'm hearing, to get the brush to lift up the hairs, and for the lather to surround the hairs. However, when I just gently press the tips of my Muhle sipvertip fiber brush to my face, I feel more of a very gentle scrape, not much of a scrub, and not much of a lift