Mama Bear Sandalwood Vanilla and Captain’s Choice Bay Rum
Exceptionally pleasant shave today. The Vie-Long brush is a badger + horsehair chimera, and it does a terrific job of lather generation. Maybe this is even better than horsehair alone—I’ll have to start comparing.
With the brush I got a wonderful thick lather from Mama Bear’s Sandalwood Vanilla, wonderful for fragrance and for thickness.
Three smooth passes with the Gillette Fat Boy holding a Swedish Gillette blade, and then a good splash of Captain’s Choice Bay Rum, which I discovered thanks to an email from Phil of BullgooseShaving.net—he also mentions it in this post at SimplyShaving.net. This bay rum is impressive: bold and solid and (as Phil comments) not too clove-ish, with plenty of solid bay fragrance and the rum coming forward a bit. I compared it to Flying Bird Bay Rum (sold on Etsy.com) and the better known Ogallala Bay Rum, and it was really no contest: Captain’s Choice is (for me) a much better bay rum. If you like bay rum, this is definitely one you should try. (And if you know someone who likes Bay Rum, we’re approaching the Season of Gifts.)
Terrific shave.
Michael, this morning I used my C&S #88 SS.
I was working with a boar Semogue and badger Rooney.
The lather is fine in both cases.
Probably, you got a poor one…..such happends)))
KanzlerBismarck
14 October 2011 at 8:14 am
After my first experience, I did order a full-size replacement puck to see whether that would make a difference. We’ll see.
LeisureGuy
14 October 2011 at 8:23 am
Michael – what grade of badger hair is used in these brushes and how does the mix feel on the face? Is the horse softer than badger or vice versa? Also, do you know the history behind using multiple animal hairs in brushes – my guess would be that it is easier to source one hair over another, but again just a guess.
Thanks in advance!
John G.
14 October 2011 at 9:34 am
I don’t know the grade of badger hair used in the badger + horsehair combinations—but I will say that badger hair grades are by no means standardized: one maker’s “best” is another’s “silvertip”, and the “finest” I have from Rooney—well, it seems like a silvertip to me, though somewhat more resilient.
The badger + horsehair feels quite nice: it’s more resilient than badger alone, of course, and has a somewhat softer feel than pure horsehair. Very nice brush.
Brushes are already made from a blend of hairs, selected for optimal performance. Indeed, the sorting of badger hair into “pure”, “best”, “silvertip”, and the like involves blending hairs (of the same approximate grade) from different badgers. In horsehair brushes, mane hair (softer) and tail hair (stiffer) are combined for an optimal mix. To combine hair from different species is just a natural progression of searching for the best end result by building a blend of hairs with different characteristics.
So you can find badger+boar, badger+horsehair, and boar+horsehair. Given a sequence of increasing coarseness and resilience that runs from badger (least) through horsehair to boar (greatest), I’ve found that for me the most successful brushes blend hairs that are relatively close together. That’s an awkward way of sayinng that badger+horsehair and horsehair+boar seem to work better as brushes than badger+boar (the Grosvenor brush).
LeisureGuy
14 October 2011 at 9:48 am
Thanks for such an indepth answer!
I have badgers, I have boars, but I don’t have a ‘combination’ brush per se… I’ll have to look into a Vie-Long!
John G.
14 October 2011 at 12:48 pm
You’re welcome. I enjoyed answering because I understood for the first time perhaps why badger + boar doesn’t seem to work so well as the combo brushes in which the bristles are not so distant in their characteristics.
LeisureGuy
14 October 2011 at 1:24 pm