I was mentioned in a Tweet by Wet Shave Review yesterday and someone mentioned having ordered a shave scuttle. So before I get started with my shower and shave, I thought I would do a blog post about the pros and cons of the shave scuttle. 7 years ago, I went back to my old barbershop which had a new owner and equipment and after getting my hair cut exactly the way I wanted it, my barber goes over to this device that looks like a toaster oven and pulls out this steaming hot towel. He then walks back over and places it on the back of my neck and holds it up to my sideburns. After that, he goes over to the Conair hot lather machine applies it to the back of my neck and sideburns. After he held it there for a couple of minutes, he whips out the mini shavette with the Personna mini Injector blades and shaves the back of my neck and sideburns with it. I've been hooked on wet shaving and hot lather ever since. So after I started wet shaving with DE's and straight razors, I looked into shave scuttles and people swore by them and I do as well after ordering this Royal Blue shave scuttle from Straight Razor Designs which is basically a miniature double boiler. Mine was made specifically for face lathering instead of the usual bowl lather:
There's only 2 drawbacks to this specific scuttle. The first is that you have to lather up to build your lather and the lather isn't warm or hot when you first apply it. So basically if I haven't showered before shaving, I do just that and work the lather in my beard with my fingers while the scuttle warms my lather up. The other drawback is that it can and often does dry your lather out but that's an easy fix. All you do is put in a couple of tablespoons of water in the bottom of the scuttle where your brush goes and you will be fine. The positives far out weigh the negatives. My beard gets a lot softer and easier to remove when I use the scuttle and I get a much closer shave as a result.
