As a small reward for surviving yesterday’s late-day shave and irritation, today I went “all out” for ultimate luxury.

-Roger & Gallet shave soap (France);

-Tabula Rasa “dry” shave cream (Germany);

-Muehle-Pinsel (Germany) Pure Badger brush with olive-wood and nickel handle;

-EJ Chatsworth (England/Germany) razor (my current favorite);

-And a special treat: The Apollo #20 carbon steel blade from Muehle-Pinsel (Germany). This is “new old stock” dating to the 1940’s and consisting of a blade 0.06 mm thick, or half the thickness of the scary-sharp Treet Blue Special! As Susan Powter used to scream: “Stop the insanity!”

I may be breaking new ground here because this may be the first combination of these two shaving “confections”. The Roger & Gallet is classic, but the Tabula Rasa is a relatively new and esoteric product only recently available in North America. It is a strange cream to boot, since it is somewhat dry to the touch and it doesn’t hold water very well. In fact, the first time I tried it, adding the usual amounts of water as I lathered, the cream fell apart and ran off my face. Terrible shave too! But then I found the manufacturer’s comments on Badger & Blade stating that no water should be added beyond just what is on the wet brush and face, and the cream came to life. Although somewhat dry it was very slippery, gave a great shave, and left the skin well hydrated afterwards. But now…how would it react to being combined with a soap in a superlather?

I can now say quite definitively that Tabula Rasa belongs in a special category (along with Cremo Cream) called: Meant to be used strictly by itself. The superlather simply didn’t happen because the TR refused to play in the same playground as the Roger & Gallet. The large dollop of TR kept jumping out of the brush and I kept having to scrape it off my chest or the shower wall and slam it back into the brush’s breach. Despite this, a pretty good lather was achieved, and it sure smelled nice…Roger & Gallet shaving soap could just as easily be called cologne-in-a-soap. The lather’s texture was more reminiscent of the TR feeling though; a little drier than regular cream or soap, but it left the skin feeling very moist afterwards (a good thing!).

Now onto the blade! Oops…bad choice of words. Remember the old expression “you can never be too rich or too thin”? Well, it may apply to starlets but not to razor blades. Given the 60 plus years of the Apollo #20 I would hazard to guess that its thinness may be more a function of post-war metal shortages than a deliberate attempt to create an uber-blade. These blades are paper-thin and just as flexible. In the tightly-clamped Merkur HD head of the Chatsworth, the blade chattered from its lack of rigidity. This was no Treet Blue Special slicing almost imperceptibly though the stubble. I could hear every whisker being cut and I suspect more-than-once with each pass, as the blade seemed to vibrate like a Gillette Fusion Power blade, but without batteries. And dammit, despite all this, I still got an excellent shave….at least an 8.5 on my scale of 10. I am now going to try Leisureguy’s alcohol total immersion (sounds like a great course!) to see if I can get a couple of shaves from this blade (they aren’t cheap!).