LG SOTD 17Jun2024
- Brush: AP Shave Ocean Waves - 26mm synbad fan synthetic
- Razor: Henson - Ti22 Medium
- Blade: Personna - Viking’s Sword (2)
- Blade: Rise - Classic (2)
- Lather: Southern Witchcrafts - Druantia
- Bowl: my left kneee
- Post Shave: Stirling - Aftershave Balm, Unscented
Monday has come again so let’s make the best of it. Welcome to the seventeenth shave of the 2024 Lather Games. Today's theme is “Don’t Have a Cow, Man!” where we shave with a vegan lather.
I’m a biologist - you aren’t going to sell me on vegan shave products strictly on ethical concerns. Nature and the universe does not now nor has ever given a flying fart how many aware beings are crushed, eaten alive, starved to death, drowned, tortured, etcetera. In fact, the notion of living beings having any differential value over non-living things seems to be a bias held by a small number of particularly clever living beings. There is certainly no indication that nature makes any such distinction.
But we do. It’s part of what makes us interesting as a species. We may very well cause the largest mass extinction in hundreds of millions of years, but we might also avoid or at least mitigate it because we are the first mass extinction causing phenomenon in the billions of years life has been creeping along the planet to be aware of what is happening and have some ability to affect it. Neat, right 😅
Which is to say that all things being equal, I would choose the vegan or at least vegetarian soap over the tallow based one. All things are not equal though. While there are excellent plant based shave soaps, it appears it’s easier to hit performance milestones with animal fats so there have been more tallow soaps in my den than non tallow by a wide margin.
Southern Witchcrafts has the best vegan base I’ve tried. Their base is great, period, top five of any base for me probably. Unfortunately, the Venn intersection of scent aesthetics for Southern Witchcrafts and my tastes is narrow. I’ve tried fourteen different scents from them and liked only one: Druantia. Fortunately, I love it, but wish they made other scents I liked. Druantia is obviously the lather for today’s shave.
Being that it’s Monday and on my way to work, should have skipped the challenge, but after going back and forth, decided that may as well try it because then I can really protest what a brain dead, not fun, waste of everyone’s time this challenge is.
Worked out that the only way to achieve this was to shave before the shower. Then, because of that, needed to move day’s shave gear to upstairs bathroom where normally shower because can’t very well go walking around the house with lather knees making a bigger mess than already. Then got to work. The shave itself was fine, typical blade face off in the Henson Medium. After the shower and cleanup I regretted the unscented Stirling - had picked to not clash with Druantia, but that was long gone in the shower by time I applied balm.
Ultimately, this is face lathering with extra steps. You literally can’t build up the volume of ready to go lather as in a bowl, so instead you treat it like a palm lather on the knees and transfer the goopy protolather to the face and then finish it there.
So, ultimately the challenge is about face lathering for bowl latherers and face lathering for face latherers while a wholly time wasting and unnecessary step is introduced for both to make it technically different than the challenge to change up your lather routine we already had.
I learned nothing, nothing about the challenge was better than slightly silly, and visually and prose-wise it’s boring to present. The only way to possibly make this challenge interesting for the audience would be to make us build on the knee standing up while the whole thing is filmed, and there is nothing that can be done to make it interesting for the shaver because it’s just needless disruption of routine for an arbitrary 0.2 points.
The “New All the Things” shaving challenge introduced the participant to a different class of razor. Reverse Lather pushed us out of comfort zone to lather up with a different but still standard method. The ATG highlighted the value of following your hair’s normal growth patterns. Pasty Lather Day served to remind us of the importance of proper hydration. Even yesterday’s leg day gave insight to most about shaving a body part that only one gender is normally expected to maintain.
But what did knee day accomplish? Nothing. Is this to build empathy with someone with only one arm and leg and an aversion to straight face lathering? There is no lesson, good or humorous, to be found.
Enjoy your day!
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Tournament of Blades Fight 420, Round 2: Personna - Viking’s Sword (Israel) vs Rise - Classic (Bangladesh)
For the second round, the Rise gave a near perfectly smooth shave. The Personna had no faults but it had more noticeable feedback.
Winner of Round 2 and Fight 420: Rise - Classic