The Very Best Budget Soaps / Creams Where Money is The Object!

It makes perfect sense hrairy, thanks for your input! If one cannot "invest" in expensive but low price per use soaps due to the initial cost, it makes sense that one might have to instead purchase the lower priced soaps. In that regard, I would imagine something like Arko might be ideal due to the combination of low cost and high volume.

Somebody posted recently that they did an experiment with a tub of Stirling soap in a scent that they either got by mistake and didn't care or bought on spec and didn't care for the scent - in any case they decided to use it exclusively to see how many shaves they could get from it and I think the total was 130 or something like that. I've searched high and low to try to find the post but to no avail - if the poster reads this please paste in a link to your post. So I can buy Stirling soap in Canada for around $17.50, divided by 130 it comes to about $0.135 per shave or approximately US$0.10 per shave. That sounds cheap. Can either NeoXerxes or andrewjs18 or anyone else with some MDC perform the same experiment with a new tub of MDC to determine whether it really is a budget soap based on a cost per shave basis? We must apply scientific rigour to our assessments of budget or not. Wouldn't it be shocking if the MDC had to be struck from the list of luxury soaps to take its place among the budget Arko soaps of the world?
Marko

primotenore did something like this last year for a month with a Brain Bowl of MdC. I can't remember what his actual results were but he put a serious dent in the MdC in a single month (I want to say he calculated that he used around 2g per shave). Perhaps Primo can chime in on this one.

Easy. Haslinger.

Marko that's a great idea, but I would take issue with the methodology of such assessments. It is too difficult in my view to assess price per shave precisely due to differences in things like technique and brushes used. The best we can hope for is a rough estimate, or at least a historical view on the subject. It's a bit like asking "how many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?" We can expect the number to vary wildly from user to user.

In this very thread, andrewjs18 pointed out why this is the case - some users will load more heavily, while others (like myself) will load just enough for the shave. But if I feel like it, I'll load more, and in the context of a scientific assessment, these small variances would bias the data in one direction or another.

On Martin de Candre specifically, I do think it is a luxury soap. But at the same time, it is a luxury soap with a fantastic value proposition in terms of price per shave. The price of the product is quite high at ~$60, however many users have been quite surprised at how long the soap lasts. In other words, if one considers "expensive" soaps to be out of the budget category by definition, Martin de Candre is obviously not a budget soap. On the other hand, if one considers price per shave as part of the value proposition of what it means to be a "budget" product, Martin de Candre (along with similarly dense and resilient soaps) just might have something to offer.

First of all, I am shocked that MdC is even being discussed in this thread. I would never call a soap that costs $55 or more a budget soap, no matter how many shaves you get out of it.

In regad to counting the number of shaves, it is very easy to do and I actually know how much soap I load on average from my soaps by doing the following. Weight the MdC soap in jar with or without lid but make note of it, then shave with it for about 10 shaves and weight it again to determine how many grams of soap were used each shave. You can do this with less shaves or more, just make sure the soap has dried form the previous use before loading.

On average I load around 1.5g per shave, and 2g with some of my soaps. Even at 2g per shave that equates to around 58 shaves per 4oz soap which would last 2 months of shaving every day. If shaving every other day it would last 4 months. For those who load 1g per shave they would get 4 months shaving every day out of a 4oz soap on average. Of course it depends on the soap and shaver as to how much they will load, but that is a pretty good average.

Hobbyist Due to the initial cost, Martin de Candre is certainly an unorthodox choice for a "budget" soap, but I think it is legitimate based on the reasoning that I articulated earlier in the thread. As for the number of shaves I get with it, without having a scale with which to weigh the soap, and judging purely by visual means, I'm sure that I don't use nearly 2 g per shave. Apparently I must load a very small amount of the soap - I've barely made a dent in my bowl.

My number one is Stirling.  Absolute best value for me.  Mama Bear's, The Beer Soap Company, and Razorock would be my tier 2.  I haven't tried any of the Italian Barber soaps, but I hear VERY good things about those too.

I'm also firmly in the Stirling camp.

Great bang for buck and they provide me everything that I need and nothing that I don't.

Justin

I know a few shavers that use one soap at a time, I think there was a thread over at B&B about using MDC straight through. I think when used consistently on it's own the average was about 1g per shave. So you would get about 200 shaves out of an MDC bowl, which amounts to about 25 cents per shave. Of course this is an average, so it depends on the person.
For the Stirling, you get approx. 164 grams in one tub (5.8 ounces), and the person said they got 135 shaves out of it, so that's about 1.2 grams/shave. Translate that into whatever cost you pay for the soap and you'll have your $/shave.
How much you use would obviously depend on your loading time and brush, but even with MDC's hard consistency and ease of lather, it would end up being pricier unless you only swirled your brush on it 5 times each shave. I mean a quarter per shave isn't that bad, but if I was on a tight budget I'm not sure if MDC would be my choice.

This is an easy one for me. Stirling is king of the budget soaps for me, and it's actually my second favorite of every soap I've tried which, includes several luxury products or high end soaps. The lather from Stirling is nothing short of excellent and, the slickness is very likely number one for me and, add to that a post shave that rivals all the best out there. The only thing I have to do with Stirling is find the right scents. I have tried 12 scents and almost every one is a winner. My new favorite might be Gatlinburg, along with Ozark Mountain, Glastonbury, Cocoa Forest, Tuscany, Executive Man, and Margaritas in the Arctic. Stirling is a budget soap with premium performance. At $12.50 to $13.50 for 5.8oz of soap in a nice green plastic tub, and around $2.00 an ounce for 4.5oz pucks, and a couple dollars for 1.1oz samples that fit perfectly into metal tins, it is hard to beat.

Honorable mentions:
Mystic Water at just under $2.50 per ounce for refills
Catie's Bubbles at $2.50 per ounce for 8oz soaps
Soap Commander at $2.50 per ounce for 6oz soaps
Razo Rock XXX tallow, the only one I've tried and it's great. Price is around $10 to $12 shipped.

Update: B&M is my favorite soap overall regardless of price. However, I do not feel it belongs in budget soaps due to the prices. Latha qualifies as a budget soap for me but I have not tried any from that line yet. My first Latha purchase will be the new Le Petit Chypre this month assuming I can get one before it sells out. After I try Latha I will update my budget soap favorites if I feel It makes the cut.

I've gotten VERY much into budget creams recently due to the fact that I find that they give me excellent shaves. Here are my top 5 (all under $10):

1) Nivea Sensitive. The absolute tip top for me. Not a great scent (though certainly not offensive), but the cushion, slickness, and post-shave feel are the best of any cream I've ever tried.

2) Palmolive Classic (no menthol). Really pleasant old school scent (wish they still made the aftershave, but it's long gone), tremendous slickness, excellent post shave feel. The cushion on this stuff is unbelievable too.

3) Proraso White. This one was a surprise for me, mostly because the rest of the Proraso line burns the heck out of my skin (which is a shame because I really love the performance and scent of Proraso Red). The scent is a pleasant-but-inoffensive grassy sort of affair, but the cushion and slickness are really lovely and the tube is bigger than most other sub-$10 creams. Really nice stuff.

4) Ach. Brito Lavanda. Classic Portuguese lanolin cream with a really pleasant, soft take on lavender (lots of bergamot in there too). Kind of a weird consistency (it's always looked very grainy to me, at least before it's been lathered), but the performance is terrific and the post-shave feel is as good as you'd expect from a lanolin cream. But did I mention the strange consistency?

5) Speick. The only reason this isn't higher on the list is that I don't find the post-shave to be especially good on my skin. But the scent is the very best lavender of any cream I've ever encountered (including Castle Forbes) and the performance is terrific at any price, but especially for a cream that's $6.50 a tube.

Honorable Mention: This isn't actually on the list because the container costs more than $10, but JM Fraser's is an outrageously underpriced cream with a classic citrus scent and marvelous performance. The jar is a full 16 oz and goes for just under $14, so, including shipping, it's still just over a buck an ounce.

I've gotten VERY much into budget creams recently due to the fact that I find that they give me excellent shaves. Here are my top 5 (all under $10):

1) Nivea Sensitive. The absolute tip top for me. Not a great scent (though certainly not offensive), but the cushion, slickness, and post-shave feel are the best of any cream I've ever tried.

2) Palmolive Classic (no menthol). Really pleasant old school scent (wish they still made the aftershave, but it's long gone), tremendous slickness, excellent post shave feel. The cushion on this stuff is unbelievable too.

3) Proraso White. This one was a surprise for me, mostly because the rest of the Proraso line burns the heck out of my skin (which is a shame because I really love the performance and scent of Proraso Red). The scent is a pleasant-but-inoffensive grassy sort of affair, but the cushion and slickness are really lovely and the tube is bigger than most other sub-$10 creams. Really nice stuff.

4) Ach. Brito Lavanda. Classic Portuguese lanolin cream with a really pleasant, soft take on lavender (lots of bergamot in there too). Kind of a weird consistency (it's always looked very grainy to me, at least before it's been lathered), but the performance is terrific and the post-shave feel is as good as you'd expect from a lanolin cream. But did I mention the strange consistency?

5) Speick. The only reason this isn't higher on the list is that I don't find the post-shave to be especially good on my skin. But the scent is the very best lavender of any cream I've ever encountered (including Castle Forbes) and the performance is terrific at any price, but especially for a cream that's $6.50 a tube.

Honorable Mention: This isn't actually on the list because the container costs more than $10, but JM Fraser's is an outrageously underpriced cream with a classic citrus scent and marvelous performance. The jar is a full 16 oz and goes for just under $14, so, including shipping, it's still just over a buck an ounce.

Nice picks Will. I definitely have to try the Speik since you speak so highly of the lavender scent. I actually love lavender soaps but the only one I have right now is a MdC sample. I make up for it in bath soaps though since my wife likes lavender too.