mere cat

Face Time: Nancy Boy Signature Shave Cream

Just a quick update on my “wet shaving” experiment, which has been a wild success. People stop me on the street just to admire my, um, cheeks and say: You smell. So good. (Punctuation is tricksy, isn’t it?)

My first two jars of shaving cream were both English (or English-style): Truefitt & Hill’s Ultimate Comfort and Art of Shaving’s Sandalwood, so I surfed around and found Nancy Boy shave cream (via Corey Greenberg’s Shave Blog). It is half the price of the premium English creams ($16), so I was hoping to like it.

At first, Nancy Boy was a big disappointment, but I was merely using it incorrectly (hence this post). The English creams I’ve tried seem to thrive in lots of water. They make a luxurious lather in the cup and work best on a wet face. When I mixed Nancy Boy the same way, the razor really tugged almost as if I wasn’t using any shave cream at all. The trick is to use it almost dry. Dampen the brush and work a little cream until it begins to foam. (In fact, you don’t even need the brush, but that would take all the fun out of it.) Apply it to dry skin. As counter-intuitive as this sounds, the razor glides at least as smoothly as it did with the English creams. Works for me, and I will probably be using Nancy Boy from now on.

After trying the five kinds of blades in the sample pack from West Coast Shaving, I decided on a brand of blades, too. It was a little difficult to decide, since I liked all the blades about equally (except for the Merkur, which just seemed dull). I noticed that I never cut myself with the Derby Extras, so I bought a bunch of those.