Shaving Cream/Soap Samples – Lessons Learned, A Ton of Empty Jars and Process Results

Grim, that was a great post with a lot of excellent information and told with a touch of humor.  Nicely done.

What you say about samples is so true.  If you have too many they will rot before you can get to them (or they will end up being completely forgotten).  I must go through my den, search for those that are never used, and toss them.  

Good information. Keep it coming.

Process Lessons Learned Part II


8.  Forget about how many shaves they say a sample will get.  This stuff is not liquid gold. It’s soap. In the big scheme of life, it’s cheap.  If you don’t like something, toss it. The frugal police are not going to chase you down while at the same time you drink two Starbucks coffees in the morning.

If you are sampling a soap, just cut a bit off and use it in a bowl. There is no need to go though a week shaving with a sample.  Later on, you can go back and use it if you enjoy it. Life is short, and there is too much to try wasting time on stuff you don’t like. On the other hand, one use of a product does not always give you the full picture. It’s always better to fully use a sample for a fair assessment.

a.  Be wary of anyone selling you anything that insists you must use the consumable from a full package to truly understand the product. Caveat emptor.  You never know if their vested interests are in play versus altruistic reasons. If they are truly being altruistic, then such is life. Then again, you already knew “caveat emptor”.

b.  Be wary of those telling you that you need to “Dial it in” or “use it for a month”.   First impressions are lasting impressions. If after a few uses you still haven’t “dialed it in” then it’s the seller’s loss, not yours. If it’s too difficult to use, move on. There will be plenty of stuff just as good, if not better, waiting for you that is trivial to use (I understand the hard water arguments – just use distilled water).   I consider ease of lathering as part of the list of attributes in analysis of product.  I don’t want something difficult and time consuming. I want it simple and easy. Call me lazy.  

9.  Don’t begrudge the seller the costs of samples. Somebody has to buy tiny little containers and repack this stuff from larger containers.  It’s not free.  Can you imagine how must work it must be and how tedious a job to get shaving creams into those tiny little jars!    That's got to be tedious.

10.  All sample sizes are NOT the same.  Some companies are generous with their offerings, some are average, and some are stingy. Some are professional in appearance, some – not so much.   If they choose not to offer samples at all, then their product better be made of unicorn hair.  Competition breeds excellence and if they do not offer samples and others do, then I question why.

Here is an example of a handful of samples waiting their turn to be used. It can easily be seen that the sizes are all over the places. The professionally packaged items were Saint James of London. There are at least four other sizes there of repacked creams or soaps. It’s easy to see how small some of those were and how large others were.



Here’s a closer look of an average sized sample of a cream



And here is a closer look at a small sample



11. What’s the weather outside? Do you want to try flower scents in the winter during a blizzard?  Do you think Frankincense & Myrrh is good when its 100 degrees outside?  

12. It’s possible you got a bad sample.  Stuff leaks. Stuff settles. Stuff happens.  


This happens more than you might think. Look closely here as it appears the components are separating



and look at this sample of a shaving cream. It leaked.  Stuff happens.

Process Lessons Learned Part III


13. DO NOT ALLOW THE OPINIONS OF OTHERS TO SWAY YOU

One of the first things I did was Google “best shaving creams” or “best shaving soaps”. As soon as I saw the links on websites pointing where to buy these products on Amazon, I should have known better. Many people have their hand out, and therefore a vested interest, in what is “best”. I learned to ignore them.

And then I started to read reviews in forums or watch videos. And just about everything was perfect. Really? There is some discussion of this here http://damnfineshave.com/thread-a-seriou...am-reviews with over 120 posts on the subject.

So other than “scent”, which is personal choice, I wondered if the people doing the reviews were using the same thing as I was. And this wasn’t just true in that some products were praised as perfect and I found wanting, but some of the “really good stuff” I thought overrated. Now the overrated rated stuff might be  still be very good product, just not perfect as some espoused.

And then, IMO, the worst are a subset of the fanatics. Not those that like a particular brand and just enjoy it. Rather, the subset of fanatics who won’t tolerate any criticism of their chosen object of adoration. Do NOT let them sway you into believing anything. Trust yourself. Allow anything you read to just be input into your decision making process.

Be wary of:


• Perfect reviews.   How many perfect products, any product, have you encountered in your life?    What happens when you see 3, 5, 10 perfect reviews from the same reviewer? “Perfect” becomes meaningless.

Have you come across ten perfect pizzas in your life from ten different restaurants?    I rapidly reached the point that when I saw that, I would ignore those reviewers. Any time I read a review calling a product absolutely perfect, now I just ignore that author if I see it being done time after time after time. If 8 or 10 products are absolutely perfect, then the scale upon which they judge things needs to be questioned.

• Agendas of reviewers.  Are they doing reviews for altruistic reasons, personal reasons, or do they have an agenda trying to sell you something directly or indirectly including a lifestyle?

• Any evaluation process that is not identical to yours. Are your values the same?  No? Then why are you paying attention to it?  For example, if one reviewer pays attention to the container, and you don’t care about the container, then their overall score will be skewed by an attribute that has no value to you.  

• Reviews where all attributes of a product are considered equal (e.g., If scent is not important to you, then why do you care what others think of the scent?) How is their score skewed by an attribute that you consider unimportant?

• Inexperienced reviewers. Experience matters. One of the first shaving creams I tried to lather was a product well known and regarded for easy lathering. You barely looked at it and within seconds, the lather explodes. I was SO NAÏVE.    That became my standard by which all others were judged. But that’s a mistake because few other products are on par with it and most never come up to that lathering standard. So there I was taking a lot longer to get one of those picture perfect lathers using other products and didn’t understand I had started at the top of the pyramid.  My bad. Now that was inexperience.  

Look at these poll results. http://damnfineshave.com/polls.php?actio...lts&pid=16 The sweet spot is evident maybe between 11 – 70 individual soaps. For a hobbyist, that might actually be a LOT. For the guy just trying to save money, it’s probably far too many. What matters, is the actual sample size and if someone has tried over 200 products, I might listen to that person more than the person trying 11. And you don’t know that from just reading a random review.

• Pay no attention to pretty lather shots. The only lathering that matters is YOUR results. Besides, white lather is about impossible to see detail without everyone having calibrated monitors and high-resolution photos on 4K monitors, something virtually not done on the Internet. It usually just looks like a blown out white blob.

• Be particularly wary of those espousing adoration for inexpensive products if they criticize high end products. What is the probability they actually used the high end product, and even if they did, are simply not rationalizing? Whenever I read something like "this is the only thing you will ever need", that is someone pushing their agenda on you.

14. DO BELIEVE crowd sourced, large sample size, and consensus.  If you look across some large number (i.e., thousands of people or a large number of non-biased independent reviews across the population), and the same product come up over and over again as a top tier product, then chances are it is a top tier product.  

15. On the other hand - It if looks like a stinky skunk and smells like a stinky skunk and performs like a stinky skunk – chances are – yeah - it’s a stinky skunk. And yes, there are stinky skunks out there.  

16. Do you know everything you are allergic to? If you buy 100 different products, chances are some chemical will not agree with you. This is a  reason why NOT to buy a lot of samples at once of the same brand. In other words, if you buy 10 samples from the same brand and are allergic to something in their formula, you might not be very happy. In fact, you might be throwing the money away.    To a certain degree this happened to me.  One well known brand consistently caused me issues with allergic reactions. One fairly bad and a couple mild, but the same brand with different scents. However, the same thing can occur with scents. If you buy many samples of, for example Lavender Oil, and then you find out you are allergic to Lavender Oil – well you are not going to be happy with all those lavender samples you will be throwing out.

17.  Some stuff is golden, some stuff is garbage.  All products are not equal. This goes back to the perfect 10 reviews.  If you buy 100 samples and decide Brand A is garbage, you will dread seeing it again. And in the end you are comparing product A with product B. This is why it’s wise to buy samples and NOT full products. It’s also a reason why not to buy 10 samples from the same soap maker at the same time.

18. Trust yourself. You’ve been alive 20, 30, 40, 50, etc. years. You know the scents you like and don’t like.   You know what Roses, Lavender, Citrus, Coconut, etc. smell like. If you don’t like Lavender, then don’t try Lavender. It isn’t going to magically smell like roses.  If you don’t like the formula in Brand A, its likely not going to be any better between scents. This is another reason it’s a good idea to NOT buy all the samples offered from the same soap maker at the same time. If you don’t like their formula, you will dread seeing the other 10 samples you haven’t tried yet.

19. Have both an aftershave and balm ready. Some stuff might disagree with you and cause irritation. If you think every product you will try will be perfect, then you haven’t tried enough products. Having a soothing balm for those bad days is a good idea.  

20. You can shave with about any product on the market sold, provided it lathers. You might not want to or might not enjoy it but you can.

SOME THOUGHTS

Why not continue testing different brands?

a. At best, this is nothing more than a snapshot in time.  There has to be an end sometime. Tomorrow V5.5 will be out, next week? V6. It will never end.  

b. There is a limit to my patience. At some point it becomes pointless. If a magical product is released, you will know about it as it floats to the top of the Internet “buzz”.  If it’s just the usual V5.6 or seasonal scent, then meh.  

c. It’s simple to crowd source reviews and see which products are getting rave reviews. If dozens of people, who are not following the herd, appear to like a new brand, there is probably a reason and they might be worth checking out. On the other hand, if a brand is getting little play, there is also probably a reason for that too.  It’s doubtful that Cinderella products exist.  Cream always floats to the top. If they do exist, they must be very difficult to obtain, too difficult for the average person to bother with. In the current Internet age it’s about trivial to set up an Internet presence for online purchasing.  

d. After awhile, you can pretty much tell from the price points “generally” how something will fair. If the consumable itself, NOT the container, is selling at three standard deviations over the norm, then if it only has average performance, it won’t last long in the marketplace. On the hand, if a product is selling at less than three standard deviations from the norm, you have to wonder why.  

What’s the norm? For over 230 unique soaps, median price was $3.24/oz. However, all ounces are not created equal. Water is the same weight for both fluid and weight ounces. Other products are not. It’s pretty irritating when some companies sell things by volume and others by weight. So at best, this is a guess.  

I don’t know this for a fact but I suspect the increase in number of soap makers over time looks something like this, in which case I have no interest anymore. The chances of someone inventing unicorn hair is likely very rare. How many formulas for soap can exist? If it exists, will it be a scent I like? There are some very good soaps that exist but I found the scent objectionable and there is no way I would use it. Others might love it. In any case, if they do exist, it will rise to the top of the trending words used in the wet shaving industry. In other words, it will be easy to figure out as long as its not a flash in the pan.



Why not try more scents within the same brand?

a.) If you don’t like, for example, Lavender, and Brand XYZ has a Lavender, then it’s not going to smell any better to you even if Brand XYZ makes the best soap on earth.  

b.) If you have tried Brand XYZ and its average, then trying more scents is unlikely to increase its technical performance to excellent.

What about V2, V3, Formula X?

Chasing technology is a fruitless exercise. There will always be something newer, something better. The real question is “how much better”? How many new formulations are standard deviations BETTER than the norm? How much patience do you have? Why didn’t they get it right on the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc. try? Why have the long established companies seem to get it right but the newbies still struggling on V3?  

What didn’t you try?

Lot’s of stuff. If someone is an obscure seller then I am going to miss them. Then again, if the products were very good, then they would not be obscure.  I also didn’t bother with the lowest priced items, some commonly found in supermarkets. Why? If a garden-variety soap or cream, universally sold for pennies, were a top tier product, the word would be out. At the beginning I was naïve and bought ALL the scents from a company. Then I learned – focus on the handful you know you will probably like.

There is one, presumed top tier product I did not try. I refuse to pay for a container that costs more than the consumable and, much of the time, its constantly out of stock. Call me cheap. It’s OK.   I also no longer care. In the big scheme of things, it’s not going to change anything.

Take your time testing

This takes time. There is no way around this or a fast path. Shaving more than once/day is not going to help you.

1. Your face needs to heal. Running a razor over it more than once a day is pointless.

2. See http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles...6-0096.pdf Ideally, one should shave at the same time each day as the fluid levels change in the face depending up if being up and about or after sleeping. Doing otherwise should skew the results.

3. You need time to evaluate the shave:

a. To really see how “close” a shave one got, 24 hours is a reasonable time to feel the new stubble growth.

b. To truly understand after-shave feel, 8 hours might give one result but how does your face feel 24 hours later? That might be telling. I have discovered a HUGE difference in face feel between the elite of the elite in this attribute and the run of the mill.

Now there might be times when a product is so bad for you that you wash it off your face and lather another product instead. I’ve done this. Remember the stinky skunk stuff? It happens. But shaving multiple times a day to rush this process is IMO folly.

How were products scored?

I scored products on a scale of 0 – 100 based upon a holistic POV. The scaling is not linear. All attributes are not equal. I looked at the entire experience, the process, and made a decision. Some things are just more important than others, but I needed to look at the entire package and not just one attribute out of context. Key attributes – NOT weighted equally but reviewed holistically – included:



• Ease of lathering

This is the ease at which a cream or soap lathers. Some, you barely look at, never mind touch, and they explode in lather. Others can be finicky requiring patience.  My patience is limited. Your tolerance level might be different than mine. While a high performing soap might make a difficult soap lathering tolerable, for me that is not true for a poor performing soap. It gets kicked to the street. So “it depends” and this is why attributes are not linear.

• Scent

This recent study indicates that human can have up to a 30% variability in scent reception.  “Individual olfactory perception reveals meaningful nonolfactory genetic information” http://www.pnas.org/content/112/28/8750.full I interpret that to mean that what smells like Roses to you might smell like garbage to me, and vice versa.

I believe scent to be important. I either like it, am indifferent, or hate it. I found some scents so bad I would not care how great the soap – it literally went into the trash.  This is the problem with descriptions like “Imagine walking at dawn in a rainy forest …”  Tell me what it smells like, not some fairy tale for children.

Although not listed, vision or the visual look of the lather and my washbasin were to some degree a bit important. I could live with off –white creams, even the pale purple or pink of some, but not the dark browns that simply looked, and sometimes smelled of sewage. A handful looked just awful.

• Scent strength

Scent strength is just what it says. How strong was the scent after lathering? Since there is no objective measure, this is also entirely subjective to the individual, and I suspect with age.  So, for example, I find most soaps far to weak in scent strength but a few, too much. In the end, this is truly subjective and up to you.

• Scent dissipation  

As lather is removed, and exists farther from the nose, obviously scent dissipates. That’s’ fine and to be expected. What’s not fine is the scent to dissipate while the face is fully lathered. I expect the scent strength to remain about the same, while fully lathered, for at least a few minutes.

• Glide

Glide should be obvious to everyone. How easy is it for the metal blade to slip across skin? I have found this all over the place. Some were so poor it felt like the blade would stop or skip. Others so good it was like trying to walk on ice.

• Cushion

I believe cushion to be the ability of the soap to protect the skin from micro nicks or cuts. It’s not going to protect from technical user mistakes. The better the cushion, the closer the shave will be.

• Residual glide

Residual glide is the ability of lather that has been shave away to continue to lubricate the skin enough for a second motion of the razor over the same patch of skin. How many times can you go over the same section of skin with a razor blade with the lather gone? Why is it important? I’m lazy and do not want to waste time re-lathering again and again if I can get away with it.

• Hydration

Some lathers hydrate the skin. Some dry it out. Some lathers literally dried on one side of my face while I was working on the other. No kidding. Some lathers literally dried in my shaving bowl within minutes.    

• After-shave feel is how your face feels after shaving. Will it feel the same in 8 hours and 24 hours? The difference between the excellent ones and the poor ones is mind-boggling. While an after-shave balm can mitigate this to some extent, one might not want to deal with balms on muggy summer mornings.

• Lather “feel” is a subjective measure of the overall feel of the lather on the fact (e.g., some are “airy”, some are “thick/luxurious”).

While getting excellent final results is desirable, and this means a very close shave with little to no irritation, the journey to the end result is just as important. Make no mistake about this. The daily process is a journey, one that can be miserable or pleasant. Since life is short, pleasant in my choice.

Some of this is subjective with no simple explanation. The perfect shaving cream/soap would have a scent I liked, the scent strength would be reasonable, and the scent would not dissipate while my face fully lathered. The glide or slickness would be like trying to walk on ice. Residual slickness would allow me to re-shave parts of my face several times without re-lathering. The cushion would be sufficient to make cutting oneself or razor burn rare. The soap would not be drying but moisturizing. After shave feel would be soft for a minimum of 12 hours and the lather feel thick and luxurious. There are no absolutes here. All products were compared against each other.

Of note, two things are missing that you might find in other reviews: packaging and cost. Packaging is missing because I don’t care what the soap comes in. I refuse to pay $160 for a soap in a fancy bowl when the exact same consumable can be had for $34 as a refill. The product will be consumed in the exact same way and I would rather have five refills, or five different products, than one fancy bowl. Call me cheap.  I evaluated consumables, not pottery that clutters closets. On a serious note, packaging kind of boggles my mind. Besides the point of throwing money away on pottery that will clutter my closets, I would have a real hard time justifying storing all the empties. The better half might just throw it all out.

As for money, I don’t care about initial cost, which seems contradictory to my previous statement but “value” is different than cost. I can and do look at value AFTER looking at all the attributes. It’s ONLY after the overall score is determined, I and decide this soap was something I might want to buy in the future, that value becomes a factor. I’ll get to that.

I also tried to ensure I tried products more than once. It’s not reasonable to try something once and just toss it. It’s also not reasonable to force yourself to use something you don’t like. However, I found products all over the map. By this I mean sometimes I:

• Found a product so bad I just washed it off my face and tossed it.  It might just stink and sometimes it actually dried on one side of my face while working on the other. And sometimes I just didn’t feel like dealing with poor products. After trying something, I just knew that it was never going to be any better and life is too short to deal with poor products.

• Liked a product so much I was ready to buy the full-sized product immediately.

• Would set a soap aside and come back and try it again later, reassessing my initial impressions. Most of the time the initial impression was the correct impression. On the rare occasions a score would be “slightly” altered up or down but never by a significant amount. Don’t kid yourself into thinking subsequent shaves are going to significantly change a score. First impressions were usually pretty accurate.

• Was disturbed by the look of the lather. If my washbasin looked like sewage from rinsed off soap, it didn’t matter to me if the soap was the best thing since canned corned beef. Bye Bye. That’s an automatic toss into the trash.

RESULTS - Part I

The High and Low Scores

To get a zero score, I would not be able to create lather despite the directions saying to use a brush. As long as it would lather, one could probably shave with it. You might not want to but it would score at least one point. I found ONE soap/cream that I could not lather and it scored zero. I did not try to use it. My water is soft, so water is not an issue. All other scores are rated against each other, their peers. Technically, I should have my highest scoring sample rate 100. However, I believe NOTHING is perfect and if I granted a score of 100, then someday I might have to rearrange all the scores. My highest rated score was 97.

The Law of Diminishing Returns

The Law of Diminishing Returns comes up more often in terms of Value, which I will get to later, but it also means something with these scores. In terms of value, it usually comes to: Is product A, which costs twice as much as product B, twice as good? Well Duh, not necessarily. Thats not how life works. The higher the performance, the greater the cost and its not linear in proportion. In terms of scoring, would something I rate 80 be twice as good, in my mind, as something rated 40? Pretty much – YES, although the law of diminishing returns does kick in and single point differences, the closer one gets to 100, the tinier the performance increases. In other words, as the scores get higher, the differences between the soaps gets smaller – diminishing returns. But at the low end of the scale, the differences could be higher. So in deciding between Product A and Product B, if Product A is 90 and Product B is 91, then the differences are so slight as to be negligible. There was just something about Product B that I thought made it superior to Product A.  But the difference between a 90 and a 40 will be night and day in my mind. You wouldn’t even talk about them in the same sentence.

Individual Scoring

So, my naïve mind thought if I had a large enough sample space, I would get a really nice normal curve like this. The scores from 0 – 100 are horizontal and the number of samples is vertical.



I was so wrong    I got this instead. Note that scores are lumped in 5 point increments and smoothed.



What? At first, I wasn't even sure what was going on here.     That peak to the right of the graph seemed far to high compared to the other smaller normal curves embedded at the lower end. Then I thought more about the process I had used, and process is very important.

The peak to the right is higher than it should be simply because as time went by, I tried more of “the good stuff” rather than stuff I knew I wouldn’t like! I got wise to throwing money away buying ALL the samples offered vice, perhaps, scents I knew I “might” like. In other words, if a soap maker offered, for example, 12 different samples, and I liked a few, I tried many of them.  However, as I wised up to the process I would NOT buy more samples of products I considered inferior. Therefore, the right side large peak increases, but the lower scoring normal curve peaks did NOT increase as I got smarter and refused to buy scents where the performance of the samples I had tried was lacking.

I decided to not throw money away on stuff I knew I wasn’t going to like. If, in fact, I had bought ALL the samples offered by every soap maker, the lower scoring peaks might very well be as high, or higher, than the high performing peak! The more I thought about this, the more it makes sense. Why would anyone buy more samples of brands where they previous samples were inferior to their peers? If, in fact, I had bought stuff I sort of knew I wouldn't like, I suspect that as the graph populated, it would have looked like this.



In other words, when I quit, the highest peak was scored "to the good side" because I was only buying stuff I was pretty sure I would like!

It obviously won't be a normal distribution, for the fact that the soaps are not actually an independent variable, because of what you stated: as time went on, you bought new soaps based on past experience, and not the whole pile at the same time based on the same criteria/research done by you.
I wonder what fit can be used to extract interesting parameters
BTW - I might have missed it, but why does the x-axis go just up to 18?

BTW - I might have missed it, but why does the x-axis go just up to 18?

Note that scores are lumped in 5 point increments and smoothed.

I should have explained that better. I took the scores and lumped then in 5 number blocks (e.g., 0 - 5, 6 - 10, 11 - 15 .... 96 - 100). When smoothed the 20 blocks each represent the sum of scores in the 5 point block. I could have just shown a bar graph but it would not look as smooth, more blocky. So, for example, between 18 and 20 represents the actual number of scores between 91 - 100.

RESULTS - PART II

So let’s look closer. Remember this is really the count of soaps in blocks of five (e.g., 76 -80 was 62). There are a lot of soaps that were just fine.  This now makes sense to me as time went buy, I refused to buy stuff I knew I wasn’t going to like. This is a breakdown, by individual product, of soaps. Anything within the large normal curve, or the right of it, passes in my mind. Anything not under the normal curve is something I would not consider buying. As can be seen, quite a few items pass. The average score was 58. The median was 67. 115 passed. 119 are items I would not buy. That’s a LOT of products in my mind worthy of being bought.




Breaking this down by individual soaps/creams, this was the result. The items marked pass were outside the large normal curve and ones I consider inferior to the rest. That still leaves a whopping 115 items. However, remember the numbers under “pass” would have been much, much larger had I continued to buy what I considered inferior products. It might appear that roughly 50% of soaps I might consider spending money on. But, in reality, the true number is probably 20% if I had bought samples I was pretty sure I would not like. That still leaves a LOT of acceptable soaps.




Breaking this down by brand, the results follow. One thing that messes up the brand's aggregate scores is that much of this depends upon how many scents are tested within a brand. If you test 10 scents of Brand A and you hate three of the scents and score it fairly, then that brand takes a score hit if you average out the scores of the brand. But you know “as a brand” it’s much better than that – you simply don’t buy the scents you don’t like. So this kind of compensation should be accounted for.

In other words, if Product A I bought 15 sample scents of the same brand, 3 I liked a lot rating 90, 9 were meh rated 60, and 3 I hated rated 30, the average would be 60. In reality, this is all scent related so they could have been much higher. Of course, this example has exaggerated numbers for effect. They are usually far, far closer. OTH, if I only tried 3 samples of a Brand B, and they just happened to be scents I hated, then they would be rated 30. However, in reality, these scores were much, much tighter, the point only to highlight that the number of samples used from each brand has an effect. As I score holistically, I kept a tight balance between scores within a brand even if the scent was terrible (in my mind).





At the top of the curve, there is very little difference between these soaps and the brands. Within the Elite, there are single point differences where for some reason of the other, I rated one over the other. I consider five brands Elite, but within the Elite, two stand out above all others.