Today's Shave...

~ Today's Shave, September 27th, 2010 ~

Cream/Soap: Speick Shave Stick
Brush: Penworks Silvertip Badger
Razor: 1961 Gillette Fat Boy Adjustable
Blade: Derby
Balm: Kiehl's

I believe the Gillette Fat Boy got it's name because the handle has a massive girth.  The razor is heavy in the hand but it is well balanced.  Being an adjustable razor, the user can set the quality of the shave from super mild to ultra aggressive in nine steps of the click stop collar under the head.  One nice feature is that the adjustment setting is retained when you load the blade into the upper silo doors.  This specimen is in superb condition.  Research tells me that Gillette originally called this razor the 195 because the price of ownership was $1.95.  Today, $30 to $45 is not uncommon for one in this condition.  It's super high quality construction and is tough as woodpecker lips.

The Speick Shave Stick was included in the purchase of the Feather Artist Club straight razor.  The technique with a shave stick is to rub the stick on your face which deposits product on your whiskers.  You then use a moistened shave brush and some muscle to whisk the soap into a glorious lather.  This is a tallow based soap which absolutely explodes into a thick foam and I need to be aware to not over apply it as it responds like a clothes washer over filled with detergent.. and much of the lather ends up down the drain.  It's moisturiaing properties seem to last all day.  I opted to transfer the stick to a twist up stick deodorant container emptied and cleaned of it's contents.  This dramatically improves the usability of the stick which is a seriously slipper affair when wet.

The image was created with the Nikon D3 handheld, 28-70 f/2.8 lens which is just exquisite, and a single Nikon Speedlight fill-bounced off a white wall camera right.  I am still learning the proper technique for displaying low resolution images for the web.  This particular image is absolutely razor sharp when viewed at full resolution on my high quality LCD display, but when down sized it seems to lose some of it's snap.