RazoRocking Friday:

One of my all time favorite brands is RazoRock. They make a legendary soap for a rock bottom price. So since today is Friday, I have decided to deem today as RazoRocking Friday. For those wondering about RazoRock, the soap is extremely easy to load onto a brush. The cushioning ability is exceptional. You will always have plenty of protection during the shave. The slickness is perfect. Your razor will have no trouble gliding across the skin. The scent is also excellent. Price wise, you can't go wrong with RazoRock's products. I think the most expensive aftershave they have is around $13 U.S. Dollars and their soaps average around $8 U.S. Dollars. If you don't have RazoRock in your shaving arsenal, then shame on you. They're a legendary product line and should be in a collection:

The shaving soap you see in the photo smells exactly like an orange creamsicle and I do have the matching aftershave balm which is very soothing to freshly shaven skin.

My DE Blades Have Arrived:

Today my DE blades arrived in the mail from Amazon's website. I love Amazon and all, but they do take forever in terms of shipping compared to other retailers and suppliers. If I had used one of my usual shaving suppliers, I would've had these DE or double edge blades in 2 to 3 days. Amazon took nearly a week. Tomorrow would've made 7 days if they didn't arrive today. These blades in the Phoenix Double Open Comb DE safety razor, gave me a shave that rivals the post shave quality of the Gillette Fusion shaving system only for a fraction of the costs. My mother bought me a 4 pack of Gillette Fusion Proglide cartridges for $21.98 at a local super market. if you do the math which is real simple to do, the costs are miles apart. So let's do some simple math here and explain why I shave with a DE safety razor. $21.98 divided by 4 cartridges = $5.49 per cartridge and you might get 2 shaves out of them if you are lucky. My bulk blades cost me $22.47 which does include the shipping and I got 100 DE or double edge blades. So $22.47 divided by 100 = .22 cents per blade and I get 3 shaves per blade. So lets break it down even further with rounded up numbers. $5.50 per cartridge and you get 2 shaves out of them. So $5.50 divided by 2 shaves = $2.75 per shave. That is not cheap at all in my book and a 4 pack of those cartridges without doing any stropping will barely last you 2 weeks. Now lets look that the DE blades costs. 23 cents per blade and I get 3 shaves out of each blade. So that's .23 divided by 3 = .08 cents per shave and I can tell you from experience that a 100 pack of DE or double edge blades will last you nearly a year easy and that's shaving daily. So it's a no brainer which one I'm going for first isn't it?

I still have some of the Gillette Silver Blue DE blades left over from last year, but I'm afraid that I will be tossing the final 2 and a half packs that I have left mainly because my beard is just too tough for those paticular DE blades which is a pitty because they were pretty smooth.

Buying a Shave Scuttle:

Here lately I have been getting really good shaves but something has been missing from the equation, hot lather. There's 2 ways to get hot lather for a shave and I've used the first option for years. The first option is to go back to the canned goo and buy a Conair hot lather machine. The first option is out. The canned goo contains too many chemicals that cause damage to the skin and over time, that hot lather machine will quit heating the canned goo. I had this machine for years and in the end, it got to where I'd have to leave it on for epic amounts of time to get the canned goo to even get luke warm at best. The other option is a "double boiler" style shave scuttle which not only keeps your lather warm, it actually gets hotter between passes while the brush sits in the scuttle. Basically, all you need a kettle of hot water for this scuttle to work. So this next pay day, I will be getting a shave scuttle and a new hot water kettle. This whole plan came about when my mom seen how hard it was for me to get my electric kettle to work and this is the 3rd one of this paticular kettle that I've had problems with.

Gillette Silver Blues are Out:

Yesterday's shave wasn't too good at all and I know for a fact that is was definately not the soap. Today's shave was much better, but the razor still left a lot of hair and stubble behind. So between going through several packs of blades and 2 shaves that weren't that good, I have decided to call it quits with the Gillette Silver Blues. They simply don't work good enough for me and my tough beard anymore. I have got a bulk pack of Perma-Sharp blades coming in sometime this week from Amazon. If those don't work good enough, I'll wait until I get paid again and order me a bulk pack of Feather blades from one of my suppliers. So if you have an extremely tough and coarse beard, then I wouldn't recomend these blades. They simply aren't sharp enough for me and my beard anymore.

Aftershave Making Still Possible:

It might be a little while, but it's still in the works. If I didn't have certain restrictions placed on me, I would have done started making both aftershave splashes and balms weeks ago. The state that I live in basically has me over a barrel. If go above a certain income level or if I started doing something full time, I would lose certain medical benefits. I also have to worry about the federal government as well. I'm only allowed to produce 10,000 u.s. gallons of denatured alcohol per calender year. Which means anything over that amount, I am subject to legal problems which I definitely do not need. I also have to be careful because doing this full time, I could lose my disability benefits which aslo includes my medical benefits. So I'm kindly between a rock and a hard place. So the only way I could do this is through bulk orders only. I'll figure it out before long on how I can do this without it affecting my benefits which is going to be tough. It will be on the up and up and legit because I have no desire or intentions of breaking the law in any way possible. If there's a change or if I have to inform someone in an agency somewhere I will if I have to.

Perma-Sharp Blades = Awesome Shave:

I recently bought a sampler pack of DE blades and the Perma-Sharp blades were in that pack. They are now my top performing DE blade. I've tried them in both mild and aggressive razors and they've never disappointed me in terms of performance. They are sharper than the Gillette Silver Blue DE blades and they're also smoother than the Gillette Silver Blue DE blades are as well. In my humble opinion, these DE blades are the absolute best that I have used in the past year that I've been shaving:

I've tried hundreds of blades, and nothing performs as good as these blades do.

RazoRock going in Rotation

After trying multiple shaving products under their name, I have decided to add RazoRock to my permanent rotation. I've tried their alum block and multiple shaving soaps and they've all exceeded my expectations. This decision came after using these products for a week and getting top notch performance. Today's shave proved that when a bad DE blade wouldn't perform. RazoRock's classic shaving soap in combination with Phoenix Artisan Accoutrements' ice preshave kept me from getting some serious cuts. So between that kind of performance and a low price point, I see no reason why I shouldn't add them to my permanent rotation.