June 30, 2024 – Bon Voyage, Lather Games!
- Brush: Semogue – 2000 (Portugal)
- Razor: Merkur – 34C (Germany)
- Blade: Gillette – Silver Blue (Russia)
- Lather: The Handmade Soap Company – Basil, Lime & Sweet Neroli (Ireland)
- Post Shave: Tallow + Steel – Cognac (Canada)
- Fragrance: HAGS – Barberwood roll on EDP (Greece)
- Bowl: Chantal (China)
- Water: Fiji – Natural Artesian Water (Fiji)
- Me: USA
Now that all thats established, heres a short rundown.
- The Lather: This soap is easily the hardest in my den, but boy does it later up with a little water. No real complaints with the soap though as it smells pretty good too. My bowl eft a little to be desired in the amount it could hold though. Perhaps it helped that I used Fiji bottled water to add to the lather, or not. I don’t plan to test any theories on this one.
- The Shave: Simple smooth shave with nothing special.
- Aftershave/Frag: I followed the shave up with a little Cognac after shave and some Barberwood. They are a terrible matchup, but they do all fit the theme of being from a country other than my own.
- Theme/Challenge: Today’s theme and challenge are using things from other countries than your own. To that end, each part of my shave came from a different country and no part came from my home country USA.
- Analytics: Since today left little for antics to fit the bill I decided I would do some analytics. I do not have an army of bots to scrape that data so I did it the old fashioned way to come up with some charts for everyone to be able to see. Since I have to have this posted before the day is up I pulled all the data in up until u/sandmanct1 (54 SOTDs). Also please note if the shaver did not indicate a country of origin, I did not go searching it out. I also did not combine United Kingdom, England, and Scotland into one location. Without further ado here’s what I found, with charts…
- Shaver Origin: This was rather unsurprising as most of us knew most of the shavers competing originate in the USA (80%).
- Lather: Lather was surprising to me in the number of different countries chosen. I expected a more complete European dominance.
- Hardware: Hardware is the one place China and Russia begin to shine (19 uses each), but still cannot overtake the Italian brush usage (21).
- Hardware & Software: Combing both hardware and software usage we see a huge Italian dominance of 42 uses with Canada a distant second at 28 uses.
- Acknowledgment: Thank you to the judges for another interesting year of the games. I can’t imagine how much work must go on to keep them running, but it is appreciated.