Aug. 7, 2022 - Headless Mammoth Hoggin' Day 7
AA Tags: #RawHoggin #MammothMafia
Soap Weight: 136.3g (1.4g used)
The brush is back to feeling fairly soft again without the pokiness that I experienced two days ago. It feels like it's splaying easier too. I'll be weighing my soaps each day to see if I can get a feel for my soap usage but so far I've just been loading until it looks and feels like it has a pretty heavy load. My impressions for how quickly this brush picks up soap was tainted by the first few days so I need to take a step back and reevaluate. I've been shaving around 6am and letting my soap dry for several hours before measuring the weight so it will be imprecise but should provide the general idea. I'm a little surprised by the amount of soap I used today and I'd be happy if I can consistently use around 1-1.5g of soap each day.
In terms of building delicious, dense lather, I'm still finding the boar extremely easy to use. With my dense badgers sometimes I start off with too much water and end up with a bit too much air in my lathers, but I'm not sure I'm able to even produce that kind of fluffy lather with this brush because I have not experienced it even once so far regardless of how much water I start with. It definitely helps to be using one of my favorite bases so it will be interesting to see how this brush performs with my other soaps next month.
At this point, I've already gotten most of what I want out of the break-in process and further improvements will be in much smaller increments and there won't be any more big revelations. The lather is already optimal for me, the boar smell is nearly nonexistent, and the brush is sufficiently comfortable for face lathering. The only remaining question for me is how soft this brush will end up being once it's fully broken in because that's the only area that's currently still lacking for me.
Once again I overshaved my jawline trying different angles of attack and got some irritation. I'll try more bullfrogging tomorrow to see if I can make that area easier to shave by creating a flatter surface to work with. The blade is still showing no signs of deterioration, but I am still finding it hard to shave as closely as I can with DE probably due to the thicker AC blades. My hairs are coarse and lie flat against my skin so I'm finding that I need to do a bit more touching up to the get all the hairs. In my experience the base plate/guard of DEs putting pressure against the skin actually helps lift those hairs up so they are easier to cut and I don't have that aid with the open blade format.
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