This is a simple, classic technique. Thanks for posting.
How to make great lather from a soap ~ Tutorial
- Thread starter Jim
- Start date
Try a touch more water. Does it really build up into a whipped cream that can stand on your face or does it easily collapse on itself?
I was having a hard time getting a good lather from a hard artisan soap. Cream like C O Bigelow was no problem - tried this method with the hard artisan soap and had an abundance of amazing lather. Thanks for the tips
It's nice to see that folks are still reading and getting benefit from this thread.
Still struggling with mine. I have a few different soaps, but all do worse lather for me than croaps or creams. To simplify things, I put aside the higher end soaps and am focusing exclusively on the basic VDH puck. If I can lather that properly, I will have a base for using the better soaps. But I still have the problem that even when I get a decent paste and add water slowly, the lather I get is either totally dry or too bubbly. It doesn't look bad, but doesn't have the yogurt like sheen or slickness of the most lazily produced lather from Razorock or Proraso.
I know this is the constant reply, but ... it sounds like you are not getting enough product on the brush. It is much harder to judge with a hard soap, because just a small amount of water in the brush can give you something that looks like you are loading the brush, but it's really not that dense and doesn't have enough soap in it. Then when you add even a small amount of water you are past where you want to be with the lather. With creams (and croaps as long as they are soft enough), you know how much soap you've got because you are adding a certain amount of cream and the cream has a "fixed" high content of soap.
What kind of brush are you using? My advice is to make sure your brush is quite dry and that you have poured any excess water off of the top of the soap before loading. If loading the brush seems tougher, that is a sign that you had too much water before and were lathering up on the puck rather than loading up. Once you become more familiar with loading from a soap puck it will be easier to judge when you are loading a heavy soapy paste vs. a much lighter soapy foam. It will also be easier to adjust the amount of soap you need for your brush, water, and shaving habits. Last but not least, do not be afraid to go back to the puck for more soap if you think your lather is going thin during a shave.
There are many effective ways of lathering different products, and as usual ymmv. But with these "how to" threads I suggest trying to follow the advice in a fairly rote manner so that you can get experience with the result you are shooting for, and then you can customize it. Also, you are much better off judging your lather by feel rather than looks. How does it feel when you rub it between your fingers and how does it behave on your face? There are useful visual clues, but in my experience they vary by soap and to some degree vary by brush, and you really want to judge how the lather hydrates, cushions, and lubricates, rather than how it peaks and shines.
This was a very helpful post. Two shaves w/VDH puck. First attempt lather wasn't too bad, but, not enough lather for two passes. 2nd round was better. Both shaves were better than when I was using canned gel before. Thanks!
A 52 year old man excited about shaving. I would've never guessed but I am.
A 52 year old man excited about shaving. I would've never guessed but I am.
Tonight i tryed somthing a little differant for me i started my lather in my mug on top of my pugk after letting it soak wile i showered then i switched to a 3cup mixing bowl my wife was going to throw away. Best lathet yet. This bowl has plenty of soom to get big strokes of the brush. What is your openyon on this.
This was just the information I needed. I am still just starting out, using VDH soap that came with the kit I bought. I've always had a difficult time with it. Putting that little bit of water on it really helped out. I did get a new razor and brush though, EJ DE89L and Semogue 1250. So far so good. Still trying to find the perfect blade, trying out different ones in my sampler I bought.
My progress report is that I generally have no difficulty lathering soaps now. But in general, the wet brush/Marco method works for me much better than the dry brush method of the original post. Moreover, I still don't enjoy nor appreciate face lathering. I've found that when I bowl lather with a wetter brush and load heavily I get rich, abundant lather that's not too different between creams and soaps. And now that I'm happy with that I've been playing with uberlather. Usually a small touch of Nivea cream with all my soaps plus a dash of glycerin.
Great tutorial. Been trying to create an elusive great lather over the last couple of months and now I can see one in my future. I wish my beard would grow quicker!
Had a practice this afternoon on VDH; Haslinger and B&M Nocture...what mounds of lather I built. It was truly wondrous. Thank you.
Glad that I found this before my first DE shave. Worked out great but I think I added a little but more water than necessary. Great stuff here
Great tutorial ! However i stay mixing in the tin rather a bowl, does anyone else do this ? do you feel the bowl would be better ?
The good news is that while you "mix in the tin" you are continuing to pick up soap, so you are really loading and mixing. However, at some point you probably want to lather either on your face or in a bowl to get the consistency and volume of lather for several passes. Also, as I mentioned earlier, if you have too much water while loading a hard soap it can be hard to tell whether you have loaded enough.
There are many ways to load and build a lather, but like all things, starting out you need a sort of formula that will give you something workable. As you gain more experience it is much easier to modify recipes. When I was struggling with hard soaps the dry method worked very well. However, before that I used soft soaps like Proraso and Cella, and for those I used and still like Marco's method (very wet boar brush).
I don't do it with tinned soaps, but other pucks get placed in a small bowl and I build my lather right there on top of the puck. (That sounds like some big technical thing, but it just means I swirl the brush on the puck until I get a good lather.) It works great and I never find that it loads too much soap for a good shave.
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