Earlier today, I used Phoenix Artisan Accoutrement's Crown King Travel Scuttle for the very first time and let me tell you, I'm hooked on it. I had to heat it up in the microwave a couple of times to find that "sweet spot" because this one functions totally different than my old one does. So lets get started on this fabulous & must have piece of travel gear:
Building a lather is stupid easy in this scuttle. All you do is load the brush up & bowl lather after filling it up with water & heating in the microwave. If you have a kettle you can heat the scuttle with boiling water that way if you want but that would be too intense & it could ruin the properties of the soap if you are not careful. My recommendation is to fill up the scuttle with water in both cavities and microwave without the stopper for a maximum of 2 minutes. I went with 3 minutes and left the stopper in there and pressure built up and blew the stopper out along with my water all over the microwave. After that I tried it without the stopper and it worked perfectly. This photo was taken right after I built the lather but before I started shaving:
The lather was moist & very warm and had no problem softening my beard. I do tend to favor it to be a touch warmer though. The next photo is after I had finished my 2 pass shave and had cleaned out my brush. The lather didn't dissipate and stayed warm through out the entire shave:
Clean up was also easy. This took less time to clean up than my old coffee cup does when I used it for face lathering. I only had to rinse the scuttle once and that was it:
How does it compare to my old scuttle? I like the Crown King scuttle way better than my old one but both have advantages. My old one is very heavy & by the time I get my lather built and heated for a hot lather shave, it has lost half of its heat. The only advantage my old scuttle has over the Crown King scuttle is the fact that I can heat it for much longer times in the microwave but I wouldn't really call that an advantage though. The Crown King scuttle held its heat through out the entire shave. It's also light weight and really takes no time to heat up and unlike my old scuttle, I can build a lather in the travel scuttle. My old one is strictly for face lathering:
All in all, this travel scuttle is epic & wins hands down and I really can't wait to try it with my other soaps & my shave creams that I have. I really can't wait to try it with both Soap Commander & Phoenix Shaving's soaps. Man oh man I'll be getting some epic shaves better than I've ever have in the past which says quite a bit.
