Moody shaves

[leviticus]

I have a habit of trying to guess what combination of variables will work by changing 2 at a time... not the proper way to run an experiment.


I had been having increasingly good shave, yet I had hit something of a plateau. Somewhere here at B&B, it was suggested to put a fresh Feather on a Progress and set the Progress to 5.

This I did. I showered with hot water on my beard, made a quick lather with a puck Honey Bee, and the shave was done in 4.5 minutes. The smoothest ever with absolutely zero irritation of any kind.

Here is my conundrum. I repeated this method last night, only with the same feather. There was significant irritation though.

I can see 2 possible causes to the irritation: (1)Feather was dulled, (2) beard growth was not sufficient.

Anyone have any experience with this sort of scenario?
Currently, I am planning on letting the beard grow for a couple of days and then try again with the same Feather to test the beard length hypothesis.

[royce22]

I recieved a blade sample pack in the post a few days ago and decided to jump right in with the feathers.
!st shave was the best shave yet. So full of confidence in my new found best blade yet. I dove in to my next shave the following day.... Blod bath :mad3:

IMO I think I was a bit cocky after the previous shave and didn't concentrate on my technique. I'm in no way suggesting this was your problem too! Just my own foolish mistake.

Moved onto the next sample blade last night, concentration set to full. Had another great shave.

Probably no help to you, but a similar experiance I wanted to share.

[maxman]

Could it be that your great shave the night previous was actually too close? That is to say that you were just on the edge of irritation but narrowly avoided it?
The next day you shave again and shave even closer thus causing the irritation that you almost had the day before?

I dont' really know what happened, i'm just throwing that out there.
Maybe you need to dial back the Progress?
I find my favourite setup with a Feather is a milder razor.

Food for thought.

[leviticus]

so far it sounds like the common denominator that is being suggested is:

technique:
1. cocky => sloppy => road rash
2. almost too close => too close next time

1. i think the sloppy can be ruled out as i am still pretty wary about using feathers from how people talk about how sharp they are

2. closeness is interesting... the first shave was incredibly BBS, however now thinking about this suggestion, i recall that when i did the second shave the blade did not seem to be reducing the beard WTG or XTG, so i went ATG... and this resulted in the irritation.
But I am then curious- would a feather only be really good for one shave and then only so so afterward?

Currently I am letting my skin heal by letting off for a couple of days, then I will test the same blade with an initially longer beard growth, hoping to test the sharpness of the blade after 2 prior shaves.