July 11, 2023
- Brush: TerraFirma Soapery – Deep Blue Spalted with Oumo Best 3 28mm Color Synthetic
- Razor: Roman Empire Shaving Shavette
- Blade: Wilkinson Sword
- Lather: Central Texas Soaps – Padre Island
- Post Shave: Pinnacle Grooming – Virgin Island
- Fragrance: Nautica - Blue
- Music: Zac Brown Band – Island Song
Summertime and the livings easyyyyy. I absolutely LOVE the vibe of today’s shave because I’m all about living that island life. The soap description for Padre Island is: “When summer finally arrives in Texas, going to the coast is usually on everyone’s mind. Notes of mandarin, sand, and ocean mist. It reminds me a little of suntan lotion. As soon as you smell Padre Island you’ll be yearning for your next vacation.” And it is absolutely true. With twin toddlers, I’ve learned vacations with kids aren’t vacations at all. They are parenting in a different location that add more stress and complications than we have at home, with four times the meltdowns! Kids! They’re great! And if you’re really lucky, you’ll have twins, like I did! But seriously, kids are…. Anyways… Island vacations: Need one. Want one bad. And this soap smells like one. If I can’t escape my day to day life, this soap is the next best thing.
I continue to #ridewithItchy and not match anything, so for the splash, I used Pinnacle Grooming’s Virgin Island to stick with my island life theme of the day. The scent is a dupe of Creed Virgin Island Waters and the image on the bottle is probably stolen from the internet. It’s a lot sweeter and fruitier than the Padre Island soap, but still quite pleasant and has my dreaming of lying in a hammock and drinking a drink out of a coconut, while listening to the waves lap against the sand.
And for the fragrance, I picked Nautica Blue mostly because blue fit the color scheme I was going for and it also fits the nautical, island theme of the day (and the bottle looks like a sail). As soon as I sprayed it, the time machine in my mind was taken back to drinking in my college dorms, instead of living the easy life on the beach somewhere. Damn, I guess I wore this scent too much when it came out in 2005, because it IMMEDIATELY reminds me of playing beer pong, listening to Dem Franchize Boyz, and saying, “I’ll just wake up early tomorrow and bang out that paper.” Dammit. Just ruined the whole vibe of my #FOF island day. Funny how scents can do that... It’s certainly not a bad scent, but it was my go-to in college and boy oh boy was that memory still attached to my temporal lobe. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go the beer store and pick up some Natty Ice.
I think the challenge is self-explanatory today. The color scheme is blue and island themed.
For the #photocontest, I have history! Within my SOTD pic is a bullet that was fired during WWI and recovered in a field in Ypres, Belgium. Every year, there is an “iron harvest” when the farmers in that area plow their land in the spring. They continue to find all sorts of old munition, bullets, shrapnel, mortars, etc. from the war to this day. It is such a regular occurrence, they have a process for disposing of unexploded mortars by simply placing them in the telegraph pole and the Belgium Army will come by to take them and safely dispose of them by doing controlled explosions. Nothing to do with today’s shave, but I thought it was an interesting fact.
The brush handle I used today is from TerraFirma Soapery on Etsy. And not only did it perfectly go with my blue, nautical, island life theme of the day, it also looks great and is super comfortable in my hand. I’ve purchased two brush handles from him, and u/keener1000 was kind enough to agree to take part in my daily Lather Games interview series. So go and check out his shop. He has a lot of nice and very reasonably priced handles available, and he seems like an all-around good dude. So, today, I’m happy to present:
10 Questions with… TerraFirma Soapery
1.) How did you get starting making and turning shaving brush handles?
It's a bit of a long, disjointed story but here it goes. I started wet shaving in 2015. I've always been a tinker-er and maker, and liked the idea of homemade gifts for my family. I was also starting to follow the wet shaving communities on YouTube and reddit, where I found Douglas's (PAA*) video on making bay rum aftershave. Lush was getting popular back then too and I figured I could make similar products at home for gifts. I started making aftershaves, bath bombs, sugar coffee scrubs and bath soaps and shaving soaps (hence the name) and giving them to family and friends for Xmas, birthdays, mother's days, father's days. I also started collecting brushes, my first fancy one was from BrushGuy, a green and gold resin one with a luxurious badger knot. A few years went by, I moved back to the east coast (navy...) And I bought a home with a 10x20 shed in the backyard. I continued falling down the YouTube rabbit hole and stumbled onto Dogwood Handcrafts brush making videos. The process and products mesmerized me and that became my new obsession (if you can't tell already I'm a bit of a scatterbrain, to my wife's endless dismay). I bought some resin, mixed up a few blanks and turned two brushes on a homemade lathe (a DeWalt drill screwed into the blanks). Needless to say I was proud of my creations, and still use the "nicer " one to this day. I fell down the lathe and woodworking rabbit hole, 4-5 lathes, 100 or so finished brushes and hundreds more in various states of completeness. It's been a journey.
*EDITOR’S NOTE: PAA is on the sub’s DO NOT BUY List
2.) Okay. I have to ask: Soapery is part of your business name… But… I don’t see any soaps for sale on your page. Is this a joke that is going over my head or did you change your business model somewhere along the lines?
I touched on this above but I can always say more. Currently it's been more of a vestigial part of our name. I love making soaps and the science behind mixing oils, butters, fats and lye to get the desired slickness, bubbliness, creaminess and hardness was so much fun to experiment with but I just don’t have the time or a good setup for it at the moment. I do batches here and there for my family when they ask, but not as much as before. I plan on getting back into software at some point, at least part time, maybe when I retire in a few years.
3.) There’s a quote I love from Jurassic Park, where Ian Malcolm in on the first demo tour, and they haven’t seen anything yet. He looks at the camera monitoring them taps it and says, “Eventually you do plan to have dinosaurs on your dinosaur tour, right?”… So my question to you is: Eventually do you plan to sell soap from your soapery?
Like I in my origin story in question 1. The short answer is yes, I would like to sell my soaps. During my time making soaps I think I stumbled my way onto a damn good shave soap recipe that I'd like to make more of and share with the world. It's not a question of whether or not I could sell my soaps, just whether or not I should at this time. The idea of selling soaps scares the crap out of me, like a TRex chasing after a little jeep. The legalese required and my worries about adverse reactions, lye pockets and a litany of other things that could go wrong make me hesitant to dive deeper into the software game again. Hopefully soap will slip its way back into my business model.
(INTERVIEW CONTINUES IN THE REPLY)