In summer, you cannot even trust the Swiss postal services. It's therefore time to get started for our September prep! Nominate your soap below; nominations close on Saturday evening 22:00 CEST.

And a question to you: since tariff-apocalypse will hit before our next installment of BVWSC (unless 🌮), do you know how this would work with smushes sent to the US? Until now, I declared truthfully that the letters contained something else than ink and paper, but I wouldn't want you to be hit with a 120$ minimum tariff upon receipt of your smush. And I cannot seem to be unable to find reliable sources on this issue.

Prepare your smushes and don't forget!

June will be busy, so lets get this out of the way while it still is May.

Nominate your soap here; proposals close Monday 26th of May, 15:30 CEST.

This Wednesday is the day, so start blooming your smush!

I was wondering about the immediate sequel: Our Mayday shave is set, and I guess in June, there will be the Lather Games. Is this correct, and do we go on hiatus, just as we did last year for August?

It is time again to suggest your soaps for the May edition!

Proposals close on Friday 4, 12:00 MEST.

As of today, I still have not received the smush from @DaveWave94@sub.wetshaving.social, and this Wednesday is the last one in March. So, what do we do?

Option 1: We drop the club shave for March, and if we still receive the smushes, maybe convene twice in April.

Option 2: We shave with a soap we all have. We discussed this issue briefly on Free Talk Friday, and the only soap that has a chance to be the common denominator is Tabac. However, I don't know whether everybody here has it, and whether you would be interested in shaving with it in the first place.

Opinions?

Prepare your smush, and choose your brush wisely!

Thanks to the newly acquired logging capacity of sotd.el (the oldest SOTD plugin for any reasonable^TM^ editor I am aware of), I've been logging every shave this year, and I thought: why not inflict the data on you?

I shaved 231 times in 2024 (roughly every 1.5 days). The move from reddit to lemmy coincides with a switch to straights – straight razors dominated my routine in 2024 (64.5%), though I still used my DE razors (22.5%) [though mostly when not at home], and occasionally I used GEM (9.5%) or AC (3.5%). If this continues, I will never again have to buy new blades. My brush collection splits between horse (45%), boar (32%), and synthetic (22.9%).

Let's go into the details, shall we?

Razors

My top five razors are straights, and it appears that I have somewhere a Friodur that I've forgotten to use.

Brushes

2024 was once again dominated by the Semogue C3 horse brush. Greatly recommended!

Lather

Trivia

I had Claude explain the chi-squared test to me and apply it to my data. It turns out that the Blaireau de la République has become dedicated to Zingari Man soaps (a value of 100.40 with one degree of freedom, highly significant, p>>0.001).

I killed three soaps (Autumn Ash, Schafmilch and Marduk), and bought three others – which is net neutral overall (yay!). I unfortunately was less disciplined with razor purchases.

The BVWSC shaves allowed me to get to know several artisans that were unknown to me, and some impressed me highly. I did not yet jump the gun, though, and my thoughts for purchases are rather geared towards what I could possibly propose as not-so-well-known soaps for the club.

In 2025, one aim is to improve my honing skills – which yield as of yet rather unpredictable outcomes.

Thank you for attending my TED Talk!

It's high time we got started again for our February meeting! Nominate your soap here!

You have until Saturday 4th January, 18:30 CET.