SOTD by u/Marquis90

July 12, 2023 - Black and white

• Brush: Muhle Badger
• Razor: Razorock – Eco
• Blade: Permasharp (2)
• Lather: Extro Cosmesi – Liquirizia & Magnolia
• Post Shave: Extro Cosmesi – Liquirizia & Magnolia
• Fragrance: CK – Everyone

#FOF
Daily challenge:

Let’s talk about face vs bowl lathering. I know, I know. Shaving is a hobby where your miles vary a lot. Not everyone makes the same experience. Still I have a number of thoughts that I want to formulate and have a healthy discussion with myself.
I usually bowl lather and after this day of face lathering, I won’t change my routine, although I had fantastic lather and a wonderfull shave.
The lathering process starts before I open my sample or full sized tub. It starts with soaking the brush. Not all brushes require soaking, but boar for example do. So when using a boar brush, you will very likely have a bowl at hand? Why not use it for bowl lather later?
Lets continue. Lets say we use a full sized tub. We can get some lather from it and go right onto our face. Point for face lathering, except… I come to that later. But what if we want to use a sample? I remeber my first shaves with samples where I tried to load from the tiny tub. So you are forced to take out a gram of soap and start to lather it elsewhere. From last years LG, I also tried to build lather on my knee. Wet brush, gram of soap and my knee. It does not work at all. I conclude that you can not take each soap and lather it directly on your face. You need a starting point. For example your bowl.
Next we managed to get some proto lather, either in our bowl or on our face. It will probably need more water. What I do is, to make one hand wet and let some water drip into my lather in the bowl. You could do the same with your brush, but somewhat it felt more difficult to control. Is it really a good advice to newcomers to let them face lather where we have more points of failure?
Here I see the benefits of GUTL. As discussed in my post from last year, GUTL works, because we have a control device (face or bowl) to determine the portion of water. If our bowl lather is too wet, we mix it with the face lather and have a good middleground, which will be very likely some great lather.
In the manual of this Mühle brush, it is recommended to massage the lather into the beard for up to 3 minutes. Thats a point for face lathering. I feel like it takes more time, or it’s just the process that applies the lather in a more effective manner to the beard. Great point for face lathering. I want to highlight u/Madflava81’s post, where he determines the best lather method by the soap base. From my experience, it seems difficult to get a great lather with a DG soap with face lathering. It needs water, it needs time. What happens between the passes? With your bowl its easy. Just put the brush in. What do we do when face lathering? I could put it somewhere on the sink or under my mirror on that plank. But today I used a very small brush. The soap would have run down and caused more space to clean after the shave. What I had to do was to put my brush into my soap container: Avoiding a cleanup. That woudl not work with a sample. It would not work with a bigger brush and normal sized tub, but then I might have luck and put the brush standing without distributing lather everywhere. And all of this can be concluded with YMMV.

Liquiriza Magnolia is my magic tournament soap, as I believe that licorice gives me luck. Cocos Nucifera (Coconut)Oil, is its third ingredient and indeed gives an easy to lather flufficity of 9/10.
Flufficity is the innofficial unit to measure the fluffiness of an object. In my second choice SOTD picture you see some of the licorice the soap is made with. Amarelli is italys oldest licorice seller. The licorice is very strong and I often compare it to 99% bitter chocolate. You have to get used to it and consume it in very small amounts. It’s great when I crave something sweet but don’t want to eat a lot of sweets. A piece of that black gold satisfies my desire for sweets.
There is also a rumor of the so called licorice aequator. It means that south of that geographic line, people do not like licorice. For example in bavaria, south of germany, you are just not able to buy licorice. In north germany and higher to scandinavia, people become more and more crazy about it. In Sweden they have it as icecream and liquer. They also prefer the more salty ones, also called salmiak.
A counterpoint to that licorice aequator is italy. Its south, but I ate licorice icecream there and they have Amarelli.
The soap starts with a great portion of that licorice and the magnolia is in the background (where it belongs). The aftershave on the other hand has some of that sweet artificial red melon scent in it. Its more floral and burns a lot. You need another moisturizer after this aftershave. My choice of fragrance was determined, in yesterdays fashion, by the color. My SOTD is almost black and white. Unfortunately this is the worst fragrance I had this month. It lasts as long as a teenage boy while passing his V-card. And it smells like cloister. Arko the fragrance, but in expensive.
Thank god it was gone in seconds and I could enjoy the Liquirizia Magnolia

**[July 12, 2023 - Black and white](https://imgur.com/iuZ1ddx)**

* **Brush:** Muhle Badger
* **Razor:** Razorock – Eco
* **Blade:** Permasharp (2)
* **Lather:** Extro Cosmesi – Liquirizia & Magnolia
* **Post Shave:** Extro Cosmesi – Liquirizia & Magnolia
* **Fragrance:** CK – Everyone

\#FOF
Daily challenge:

Let’s talk about face vs bowl lathering. I know, I know. Shaving is a hobby where your miles vary a lot. Not everyone makes the same experience. Still I have a number of thoughts that I want to formulate and have a healthy discussion with myself.
I usually bowl lather and after this day of face lathering, I won’t change my routine, although I had fantastic lather and a wonderfull shave.
The lathering process starts before I open my sample or full sized tub. It starts with soaking the brush. Not all brushes require soaking, but boar for example do. So when using a boar brush, you will very likely have a bowl at hand? Why not use it for bowl lather later?
Lets continue. Lets say we use a full sized tub. We can get some lather from it and go right onto our face. Point for face lathering, except… I come to that later. But what if we want to use a sample? I remeber my first shaves with samples where I tried to [load from the tiny tub](https://imgur.com/dGl0qIc). So you are forced to take out a gram of soap and start to lather it elsewhere. From last years LG, I also tried to build lather on my knee. Wet brush, gram of soap and my knee. It does not work at all. I conclude that you can not take each soap and lather it directly on your face. You need a starting point. For example your bowl.
Next we managed to get some proto lather, either in our bowl or on our face. It will probably need more water. What I do is, to make one hand wet and let some water drip into my lather in the bowl. You could do the same with your brush, but somewhat it felt more difficult to control. Is it really a good advice to newcomers to let them face lather where we have more points of failure?
Here I see the benefits of GUTL. As discussed in my post from last year, GUTL works, because we have a control device (face or bowl) to determine the portion of water. If our bowl lather is too wet, we mix it with the face lather and have a good middleground, which will be very likely some great lather.
In the manual of this Mühle brush, it is recommended to massage the lather into the beard for up to 3 minutes. Thats a point for face lathering. I feel like it takes more time, or it’s just the process that applies the lather in a more effective manner to the beard. Great point for face lathering.
I want to highlight u/Madflava81’s post, where he determines the best lather method by the soap base. From my experience, it seems difficult to get a great lather with a DG soap with face lathering. It needs water, it needs time. What happens between the passes? With your bowl its easy. Just put the brush in. What do we do when face lathering? I could put it somewhere on the sink or under my mirror on that plank. But today I used a very small brush. The soap would have run down and caused more space to clean after the shave. What I had to do was to put my brush into my soap container: [Avoiding a cleanup](https://imgur.com/Gp06dPv).
That woudl not work with a sample. It would not work with a bigger brush and normal sized tub, but then I might have luck and put the brush standing without distributing lather everywhere.
And all of this can be concluded with YMMV.

Liquiriza Magnolia is my magic tournament soap, as I believe that licorice gives me luck. Cocos Nucifera (Coconut)Oil, is its third ingredient and indeed gives an easy to lather flufficity of 9/10.
Flufficity is the innofficial unit to measure the fluffiness of an object. In my [second choice SOTD picture](https://imgur.com/IZPP0EL) you see some of the licorice the soap is made with. Amarelli is italys oldest licorice seller. The licorice is very strong and I often compare it to 99% bitter chocolate. You have to get used to it and consume it in very small amounts. It’s great when I crave something sweet but don’t want to eat a lot of sweets. A piece of that black gold satisfies my desire for sweets.
There is also a rumor of the so called licorice aequator. It means that south of that geographic line, people do not like licorice. For example in bavaria, south of germany, you are just not able to buy licorice. In north germany and higher to scandinavia, people become more and more crazy about it. In Sweden they have it as icecream and liquer. They also prefer the more salty ones, also called salmiak.
A counterpoint to that licorice aequator is italy. Its south, but I ate licorice icecream there and they have Amarelli.
The soap starts with a great portion of that licorice and the magnolia is in the background (where it belongs). The aftershave on the other hand has some of that sweet artificial red melon scent in it. Its more floral and burns a lot. You need another moisturizer after this aftershave. My choice of fragrance was determined, in yesterdays fashion, by the color. My SOTD is almost black and white. Unfortunately this is the worst fragrance I had this month. It lasts as long as a teenage boy while passing his V-card. And it smells like cloister. Arko the fragrance, but in expensive.
Thank god it was gone in seconds and I could enjoy the Liquirizia Magnolia