The Clash: Day 20 of Lather Games

• Brush: Declaration Grooming Washington Blood of Kings B3
• Razor: Atelier Durdan – Horizon $ARTISTCLUB $ADJUSTABLE $CNC
• Blade: Feather Professional
• Lather: CBL – Rock the Casbah
• Post Shave: Stirling Soap Co. – Boat Drinks
• Fragrance: Farina – 1709

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Theme justification: I never wrote down the scent notes of CBL Rock the Casbah because I don’t like the scent, and apparently the internet agrees with me because I can’t for the life of me find any person or site that found it worthwhile preserving them. The scent is a strong aromatic lavender (and if you’ve ever tried CBL, you know what I mean by “strong”. It’ll wrinkle your nose) with some warm, slightly nausea-inducing note that neither I nor my wife can place. What’s sure is that it doesn’t play well with sweet banana-coconut-rum combo of boat drinks. Farina’s bright Tuscan summer citrus throws a last wrench in this construction. You’ll note that I chose products that dissipate quickly.

The star of this shave is the razor. These hashtags have never been seen in that combination before. In this particular community, being European is usually a downside: I pay more for things, get them later, and reselling makes no sense because of shipping costs. But not today. Our ever-busy shave goods sponge u/J33pGuy13 somehow has the juice to get a prototype of the soon-to-be-released Horizon (French horizon, not English) for a pass-around. Since I live closest to Augustin, the pass-around starts with me 🎉.

So this razor has a very simple cam mechanism to move the base plate back and forth w.r.t the top cap where the blade tabs anchor the blade. Looking at the video from Augustin, I was worried about the alignment between the base plate and the top cap as the adjustment bolt slides from one end of the cam to the other, but it turns out that the two pieces have tight tolerances: they slide easily with no perceptible slack. Really satisfying.

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I decided to start on level one for this first use. It’s fairly straight forward to find the right angle, and even at this lowest exposure, the razor is plenty efficient. The feedback is not quite GEM or Futur level, but quite loud and satisfying by safety razor standards. The head is heavy, maybe the heaviest I’ve tried, and that includes contraptions like the Wilkinson razor. I’m not sure yet how I feel about that, but it didn’t get in the way of a close and comfortable shave.

I’m a sucker for mechanical innovations in safety razors so this is catnip for me. I can’t find thrill anymore for yet another very well made three-piece safety razor, but this I can get behind. I’m holding back and try to continue forming opinion until I have more shaves with it under the belt, but this went as well as a first shave can.