Okay, have a seat. This may take a while.
I was good during all of the Black Friday sales and didn’t buy anything, even though there were some great deals to be had. But I had my wishlists out there to my family and hoped I’d get something from them.
I did buy the Cella Red and Organic (green) product lines after Christmas, but that was because I’d decided I was going to buy them if no one got them for me for Christmas. So yeah, totally justified.
But then January came, and, well, I wanted a couple of things. I’ve talked about it for a bit, and decided that I’d get a Merkur 500 Progress adjustable razor. And somehow, in the box, there was also a Goodfellas’ Smile Syntesi razor. I contacted the vendor and pointed this out, and they told me to keep it. So…free $80 razor, I guess.
I know very little about the Syntesi, to be honest. It appears to be a mild or medium-mild machined aluminum razor from the Italian brand Goodfellas’ Smile, though the razor is made in China. But it looks cool, so I’ll add it to the collection and give it a go.
I got an e-gift Visa card for responding to a survey, and that was enough to cover the cost of a Muhle R89, which I’d been considering for about a week before that card arrived in the email. But then a Shopify deal popped up cutting $20 off of the $48 price of the razor, so that clinched the deal and I ordered.
I used the rest of that gift card with some of my own personal money to pick up some stuff from Maggard Razors during a brief sale. What I picked up was the following: samples of Martin de Candre Original shaving soap, Noble Otter Noir et Vanille soap, Catie’s Bubbles A Midnight Dreary soap, Cella Riserva Fresco soap, House of Mammoth Shire soap, Fine Accoutrements Bay Rum soap, and a full-sized tub of Mike’s Natural Soap Unscented. And a beard brush and a tube key. But we’ll talk about those later.
Oh, and filling out the box that the Merkur came with, I threw in a tube of Taylor of Old Bond Street Jermyn Street for Sensitive Skin cream, and a tube of Old Spice Original shaving cream, and a bottle of Stirling’s Unscented aftershave balm.
And then…hoo boy, let’s dig into this one…Remember back in August or September, I responded to a post on Reddit from someone who was going to do a fundraiser bike ride to raise money for the Children’s Cancer Research Fund. She got donations of gift cards to give away as prizes to randomly drawn contributors, and I actually won two of them. One was for Hoffman’s Grooming. The other was for Henri et Victoria.
Now, Henri et Victoria is based in Quebec, specifically on the outskirts of a town on the Quebec side of the river from Ontario and Ottawa. They’re a brand I see a bit online, but as always, I was excited to give them a try, especially as I had free money to use–though the gift card was worth $50 Canadian, so it wasn’t quite as much as one might hope….
I placed an order the same day as the Hoffman’s order (and we know how the Hoffman’s order went–you can read about it here). The next day, I got an email from someone at Henri et Victoria saying that because of Trump’s tariffs, they weren’t shipping to the US right now. My order was cancelled, and I figured I’d just have to wait a while until things settled back down.
Then in November, I got an email from this same person, telling all of the Americans on their contact list that they’ve worked something out with an international shipper or something like that where we could place an order during the next couple of weeks, choosing from among a limited selection of their products that were okay to import without huge tariffs, they would package and gang them all together on a palette and then ship it with this partner to the US, where the partner would then get them shipped out from wherever they landed in the US.
That note was in mid-November. I got a shipping notification sometime in early December from UPS, saying they’ve got the package info, but are waiting for the package. Then nothing…
For a while, I checked daily, then weekly. I really couldn’t complain to Henri et Victoria for a couple of reasons: first, this was free to me. Second, who knows what was going to happen to clear customs? Honestly, I hit a point where I just figured it probably was never going to come, and that was fine with me because I paid nothing for it. But then, just a few days ago (early February for me), the UPS shipping tracker updated to say that it has shipped from Pittsburgh..
So yeah, one full tub of shaving soap, two shaving soap samples, and three aftershave balm samples have arrived.
So all told and all of a sudden, I’ve got 3 new razors, 1 new blade brand, 12 new lathers, and 4 new aftershaves. I will be very busy trying new things this year, and I’m really looking forward to it. In fact, the shaving plans are at least penciled out for about a month and a half. This alone could provide 30 shaves, if I didn’t use anything else.
So let’s talk about why I got what I did.
Let’s talk about the razors first. Why the Merkur? In the State of the Shave of the Day address, I said that while I was pretty set with razors, there were still a couple that I was thinking about, including a traditional twist adjustable razor. I decided that since I already have a Rockwell and Parker razor, their offerings in that category were out–I needed a new to me brand, so I opted for the Merkur. The added bonus here is that it’s relatively inexpensive at just under $70.
I’m also really embracing the mild to medium-mild razors in my collection, and in doing some research into others that can be classified as such, I found that the Muhle R89 is, indeed, in that category. I see it a lot in shave posts, so I casually added it to the wishlist because it should be something that works well for me, but is stylish and classic. I figured I’d come to it maybe mid-year, but then, well, everything happened and I ended up with one.
The Syntesi will be interesting. It’s a modern design, but unlike Henson, Goodfellas’ Smile prefers a 45-degree angle to their head, so I’ll have to see how that goes. People who use them seem to really like them, and for the most part, they have pretty unique designs.
Needless to say, reviews will be forthcoming over the coming months as I have to try to work all of this new stuff into the rotation.
Oh, and the Muhle was the only razor that I got blades with because the single Merkur blade was missing from the Merkur. Since I already got a freebie out of them, I decided to let that go.
I still want to get a Razorock Game Changer and maybe one of their Superslant razors later on. We’ll see when and if that happens this year.
So on to the software.
Being that I love the Taylor of Old Bond Street Organic shaving cream, I decided I needed to try the Jermyn Street for Sensitive Skin cream, and got a tube instead of a tub because there’s less to go through, and the price was about $10 cheaper. And I filled out the box with the Merkur and TOBS Jermyn street with some Old Spice Original shaving cream because it was $5, and yeah, classic Old Spice.
Maggard’s Razors sent an email with a small sale on orders from their site, and there have been some brands I’ve been wanting to add that get a lot of mention online. So I added samples of them, and included the Cella Riserva Fresco because I want to see how the other soaps are in their product line. There’s one more in their brand, but that was out of stock. The Martin de Candre is one I see a lot of people using and raving about because it works well and lasts a very long time. Catie’s Bubbles is kind of a trendy brand right now, but people speak well of it, so I threw in a sample tub of it. The Noble Otter and Mammoth are brands people really like but I’ve never tried. Fine Accoutrements appears to be a classic old brand that isn’t, which I’ve heard a lot of about, so wanted to give that a go. And Mike’s Natural Soaps is another brand I see often that appears to be a one-man shop, though I’m confused as to where they’re based–their site says Parlin, NJ, my soap says Portland, OR, and others I’ve seen say Ann Arbor, MI. So go figure.
To get over the shipping cost with Maggards, I added a bottle of Unscented aftershave balm from Stirling Soap Co. Generally, I like their stuff as long as it isn’t any of the fragranced products. So this was an easy call.
And the beard brush and tube key? I need a tube key to help roll down the tubes of Proraso and other tube-based products. I mean, I’m not there yet, but I’ll need it some day, right? And it was only $4 or something.
The beard brush is something I’ve wanted/needed for a bit. I use beard oil and beard butter on my beard, and it’s really helped keep the skin under the beard healthy, and keep the beard itself healthy. The brush not only helps groom it, but get those products down to the roots of the beard hairs. I’ll talk about it more in another post, but at a high level, it’s a synthetic bristle brush that fits nicely in the palm of my hand.
So there you are: the latest additions to the ever growing stable of shaving products here. There aren’t many things on my list of new stuff to buy–just a razor or two and maybe one more soap. And those will come later. But I am getting to the point where I need at least one refill of a Proraso product, so I’ll have to pick that up soon.
Obviously reviews and follow up will be forthcoming, but it will be a lot to get through, so I might not get to some things you want to see for a few months. Just a note that I review software after 2 uses, and give an initial review of razors (and blades) after one week of shaves. With 40 lathers now, you can see how things might get stacked up a bit.