What's the deal on "artisan" Shaving Creams?

"Rot" is the term used by cream soapmakers for the resting phase before the soap is ready to be finished or used. It doesn't refer to the soap going bad.

"Rot" is the term used by cream soapmakers for the resting phase before the soap is ready to be finished or used.  It doesn't  refer  to the  soap  going bad.

ROFL. My bad


I think, perhaps, the herd mentality combined with the concept that a soap is "cool" is a big factor in this. I am old enough to remember shaving creams in tubes from before the advent of the cartridge razor and surely shaving creams existed and might have been preferable for convenience sake (or not). Someone today might think - hey, its nostalgic and cool.

So to put this in beer terms
Cream = Lager
Soap = Ale
?

At first I thought you meant top vs bottom fermenting. From my limited home brew of Ale I think that's an interesting analogy since most people can brew an ale at home pretty easily with minimal equipment of expertise but lager takes a lot more specialized equipment and knowledge so that makes sense to me.

6 months for a cream to rot? The EU requires labeling on the packaging of when they will start to go bad. Most of the tubs I've seen say one year. Some creams in tubes say 18 months?

I think you got it wrong, my friend.

Once we - the customers/shavers, buy the cream, the cream has already rotted in the production plant for anything to 6 months to a year BEFORE the cream is ready to be poured into the pots as the final product.

What makes a cream cumbersome to produce for the artisans is the fact that the cream need to rot before the final cream is ready.

As Will states, if a cream becoames popular and the artisan has only made 1000 pots of it, and people demend more - it will take an artisan anything from 6 months to a year before the artisan will be ready with the new batch. By then the cutomers often have forgotten about it and long for something else.

So to put this in beer terms
Cream = Lager
Soap = Ale
?

At first I thought you meant top vs bottom fermenting. From my limited home brew of Ale I think that's an interesting analogy since most people can brew an ale at home pretty easily with minimal equipment of expertise but lager takes a lot more specialized equipment and knowledge so that makes sense to me.

That was what Will's explanation made me think. Ales are faster/easier to produce, while Lagers are slower/more complicated to produce.

Absolutely it can be a thing. We humans are influenced a great deal by perceptions of "authority". Edward Bernays, the father of public relations started the idea. This is from 1928. http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Propag...rnays.html  "... man is by nature gregarious he feels himself to be member of a herd, even when he is alone in his room with the curtains drawn. His mind retains the patterns which have been stamped on it by the group influences. ... when the example of the leader is not at hand and the herd must think for itself, it does so by means of clichés, pat words or images which stand for a whole group of ideas or experiences"

Follow the herd. Everyone else is buying Haslinger? I have to try it.  After all, its only $4.50 in bulk. That's the idea.

I think you may have misunderstood me grim. What I was really referring to was the statement that creams somehow don't perform or weren't "cool" vs. soaps and somehow having a subsequent impact on their availability. I suspected that it was really a byproduct of the rise of artisan soap quality and any associated difficulties in producing creams.

Either way, very cool thread and interesting to learn from the artisans in the community.

[ I think you may have misunderstood me grim. What I was really referring to was the statement that creams somehow don't perform or weren't "cool" vs. soaps and somehow having a subsequent impact on their availability.

My bad. Yeah, I misunderstood.

DeLuxe makes a few cream soaps in tubs which are pretty good but they really don't keep very long. Nancy Boy creams are meant to be used within 6 months.The cool thing about soaps, especially by some Artisans is that they can last quite a while during a rotation. I guess that's my version of a popular answer.

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Beat artisan creams IMHO are these 3, all from Europe :

Esbjerg
Castle Forbes
Baume.Be


Tabula Rasa  is really a soap, but soft enough to be called a cream too - if Tabula Rasa is a cream, it would go straight to my number one favourite artisane cream !

...Nancy Boy...TOBS, DR Harris, and GFT are all creamy soaps. I think Truefitt & Hill is a cream that lathers...

Technically, all of the above are soaps, albeit very soft (creamy).
They all contain saponified fats, and by this virtue should be latherable.