Description
I love all things French, so ‘we’ simply had to import this new French shaving soap from Thiers-Issard.
A vegan base, and milled, this is not as rock-hard firm as the English triple-milled stuff.
6.5x3cm Ø x Height
Having used this multiple times, I can confirm it is an extremely easy to lather milled hot-process soap. I’m crazy; I’d almost say being easy to lather’s a demerit for it usually comes at concessions I don’t want to make, concessions you do NOT make if using always-hard-to-lather *cold* process soaps (which are never milled). Obviously, in the shaving snob realm that’s an unpopular opinion, and a silly one to invest your money in for-profit. But fact is, cold-stir soaps are better at feeling slimy/slippery and, most crucially, imparting sense of their hydration *in to*, rather than *upon*, your skin. They’re a pain in the arse, though, and that’s not changing. If you liked, you could consider the cold stir soap’s fussy nature a “feature”, like how a cat doesn’t do a damned thing you tell it to do (I like cats now, but they are not like dogs). This soap’s not that; it lathers easily, it has lots of lather volume, it has good lather ‘height’/cushion, and the lather stays put about as well as you can expect from a milled soap without tallow (soaps with stearic base and water, like Proraso, are most stable of all). Being milled, you’ll get a ton of shaves for your $20 (a lot more than 2x as many as you’d get from buying the Proraso for half as much, meaning cost per shave is reduced).
As to the fragrance, it is more precisely verbena, not vetiver. They’re close cousins, but different things. Vetiver can be sweet and bright like this, or it can be slightly earthy, or the green smell of a forested area not dominated by pine which does not have strong secondary growth underfoot. But most vetiver men’s grooming items are a combination of these things. Verbena | verveine is best pigeonholed as the bright, sweet citrus-like top/first notes of a complex vetiver odor, and that’s what you get here. In fact, to my nose, it smells *precisely* as this bath soap, and so I am inclined to believe they both source the fragrance portion of the product from the same place in Grasse, FR.
Ingredients: Potassium Stearate, Sodium Stearate, Potassium Laurate, Sodium Laurate, Glycerin, Aqua, Lauric Acid, Pentasodium Pentetate, Terasodium Etidronate, Parfum, Limonene, Citral, Citronellol, CI77891, benzyl alcohol, dehydroacetic acid
Made in France.
