Finding the grain.

I've been thinking about how a newbie can find the grain patterns easily without using a live blade to play with and this might work for some.

Take a CC or plastic gift card and lay it flat against your face. Now start lifting the card and start moving it slowly until you feel the edge of the plastic come into contact with your beard. This is going to be the same technique your going to use to find the edge of the blade.

Move it so the edge is only making contact with your hairs and not scraping against your skin. This is just about the amount of pressure, (or lack of pressure) your going to want to apply to your razor when you go for the real thing.
At no time do you want to feel it scraping or coming into contact with your skin, at all!

Start moving the plastic edge around your face, and feel when the edge moves easily without hardly any sound or resistance. Your probably moving with the grain in that section. If there's noteable drag and resistance and more noise, your probably moving against the grain at that point and make note of these areas.

Using the edge, discover the other areas that are wtg, xtg and atg and which direction you have to move the plastic edge to find wtg.

I'm not sure how well this will work out for most, but it seems to me to be a lot less painful method than discovery with a live blade would be and might give you a good idea about how to keep the edge of the blade off your skin, that's the bad thing. Just keeping the blade floating off your skin and coming into contact with only the hairs, that's the good thing. Just some early morning musings and as always, YMMV.

Sounds like a great technique. Wish someone had mentioned that idea to me a while back when I was just learning. Seems more accurate than running the hand over the face.

Sounds like that old shaving commercial from the (70s? 80s?) where the Dude shaves one cheek with product X and the other cheek with product Y, and then The Hot Chick flicks a credit card on both cheeks ... the with X-cheek making much less noise ... and of course a 'come hither' glance soon followed.

Doc4 said:

Sounds like that old shaving commercial from the (70s? 80s?) where the Dude shaves one cheek with product X and the other cheek with product Y, and then The Hot Chick flicks a credit card on both cheeks ... the with X-cheek making much less noise ... and of course a 'come hither' glance soon followed.

Click to expand...

Don't be expecting any 'come hither' glances anytime soon from me Doc, and I still think this would be an easier way for a newbie to discover grain pattern rather than with a Vision and a Feather like I did.

This sounds like a great idea! I agree that just going by feel is probably less precise. My beard grows in all kinds of directions on my neck, so this will (hopefully) be a good way to get a good map of growth. Problem now is I'm too close to my shave to try it out...but in several hours when the growth is long enough I'll give it a try.

Patrick D said:

Don't be expecting any 'come hither' glances anytime soon from me Doc, and I still think this would be an easier way for a newbie to discover grain pattern rather than with a Vision and a Feather like I did.

Click to expand...

Don't worry, you're not getting one of these from me anytime soon!! (Not that there's anything wrong with that ... )

Sounds like a good idea. I tried several methods because I quickly realized I had some wild patterns.

1) The finger feeling method.
2) The 10x Magnifying mirror method
3) The daughter taking macro pictures method to create my own shave form.

Doc4 said:

Sounds like that old shaving commercial from the (70s? 80s?) where the Dude shaves one cheek with product X and the other cheek with product Y, and then The Hot Chick flicks a credit card on both cheeks ... the with X-cheek making much less noise ... and of course a 'come hither' glance soon followed.

Click to expand...

I remember that commercial. It was very catchy at the time.