A wonderful boar brush and Darkfall, with the redoubtable iKon 102

My Omega 20102 is now well broken in, and it’s a wonderful brush — but you already knew that from the title, right? It has excellent capacity, a very nice feel on the face (a perfect degree of give and resilience), and it works up an awesome lather, though of course the shaving soap is definitely a contributing factor to that, and Declaration’s Darkfall in their Icarus formula is quite a nice soap:

Stearic Acid, Water, Castor Oil, Avocado Oil, Vegetable Glycerin, Mango Seed Butter, Potassium Hydroxide, Sodium Hydroxide, Fragrance, Bison Tallow, Lamb Tallow, Colloidal Oatmeal, Goat’s Milk, Lanolin, Bentonite Clay, Tocopheryl Acetate, Hippophae Rhamnoides (Sea Buckthorn) Fruit Extract, Salix Alba L. (White Willow) Bark Extract, Vitis Vinifera (Grape) Seed Extract, Tetrasodium EDTA, Tussah Silk

The fragrance is aimed at autumn as the name implies. Their description:

Darkfall is a spicy oriental designed to capture the spirit of fall in the rural south. Agarwood, amber, and benzoin provide a deep, warm base for the cinnamon and clove top notes. Birch tar adds a slight smokiness that represents the ever-present smell of burning leaves that heralds the arrival of fall in Georgia.

Because the knot is fairly large, I left it slightly wetter than usual because I wanted to load it with enough soap for the size of the knot, and that I got it well loaded in one go (no added water needed), despite the Bentonite clay in the soap.

The iKon 102 is a superb razor, and shaving with it is a delight. It easily left my face perfectly smooth in three passes.

A good splash of Anthony Gold’s Red Cedar aftershave, a favorite, and the week begins — yet another momentous week.

I’ll mention in passing that I’ve updated my quick & easy steak post with how to do a slow & easy steak, a method that strikes me as better in several respects.