Actually, a better name would be “The limited-water shave”: how to shave when you have only a small amount of heated water—as when camping, for example. But the most common use of this shaving technique is for shaving when the tap water is insufferably hard and thus cannot produce good lather from a soap because the minerals in the water immediately bond to the dissolved soap, forming a sticky scum that clings to bathtub, shower walls, sink, and your skin.
“Hard” Water?
A shaver who lives in the same town where he was raised may not even realize that the water is hard—it’s just water, the same stuff he’s used all his life. He may note that he can’t get good lather from soaps, but shaving creams do fine (because they are less affected by hard water), so he figures he must have “shaving-cream brushes” rather than “soap brushes”. But the problem is the water, not the brushes.
The distilled-water shave is both a way to test your tap water through a performance comparison, and also it’s a workaround in case installing a water softener is not an option (e.g., for apartment dwellers). As noted, the contrast between hard and soft water will be particularly evident with shaving soap, so try that.
Get a gallon of distilled (aka “purified” water) at the drugstore, where it sells for about $1/gallon for use in steam irons, steamers, vaporizers, and the like. Heat 1 cup of it to around 115ºF-120ºF (46ºC-49ºC).
For boar brushes: Pour enough hot water in a coffee cup to soak the boar brush while you shower. The remaining water in the cup can be used to rinse the razor’s head of lather during the shave. For other brushes, just pour about 1″ of water in the cup for razor rinsing and simply dip the brush into the reserved water to wet it throughly.
Load the brush with soap by brushing the tips briskly and with a certain firmness over the puck, and continue even after you first start to see some lather: you want to get enough soap into the brush for a thick and creamy lather.
You may need to add just a little water—on the order of 1 teaspoon—to bring the lather along, but since it’s distilled water, the lather will be abundant. Work up the lather on your beard or in a bowl, and shave.
I begin my shaves by washing my beard with Musgo Real Lime Glyce Soap
You can rinse your hands under the hot-water tap: no need to use distilled water on your hands. For the same reason, a warming scuttle, if you use one, does not need distilled water: again, just use water from the hot-water tap.
The “rinse” following the first and second passes can, like the “rinse” of MR GLO, is more a matter of using a spoonful-amount of water to wet your face than it is a true rinse. Only the final rinse needs to be thorough.
Use any remaining distilled water to rinse the brush as best you can, then finish the rinse under the hot water tap until the brush is cleaned of soap, followed by a final rinse in cold tap water.
With a little practice, you can get a good shave with 1/2 cup of distilled water, which means a gallon will provide water for 32 shaves: a month, comfortably.
If you try this and discover that you get a much better shave with distilled water, you might consider a water softener: hard water not only makes for bad shaves, it’s also hard on the plumbing and the valves. The best solution is a water softener that provides soft water throughout the house save for outside faucets and the kitchen cold water. (Because softened water is relatively high in sodium, it should not be used for drinking or cooking.) The best softeners regenerate based on volume rather than time, which automatically accommodates periods of low usage (vacations, for example) and high usage (house guests, for example). A twin-tank softener provides uninterrupted soft water even when the unit is regenerating.
This was a great article! Thank you.
Would it solve all hard water problems if you installed one of those purifiers on your faucet? I know Brita has one. I’m there are others out there, but it would take up a lot of the sink anyways. If you don’t mind shaving in the kitchen sink, then it would solve everything I guess.
I personally like shaving outside of the bathroom. For some reason, I get better shaves. Maybe it’s because it’s out in the open and not in a closed, humid environment?
The Brita-type filters remove particulate matter but not minerals dissolved into the water. For that, a water softener is needed.
What about just boiling the water for a long period of time? Or what I used to do. Just buy purified water from the grocery store and heat it up in a tea kettle on a portable electric burner. That’s what I used to do when I needed really hot water, when our water wasn’t coming out hot. It takes a lot of space and you have to be careful not to burn yourself or knock off the tea kettle, but it’s worth the effort I guess.
If you boil water, I think you mainly get hot hard water, though some minerals will precipitate as the water heats (thus the hard-water deposits that ruin hot-water heaters).
Good idea: using distilled (aka “purified”) water for the shave. It can be done simply to test whether your tap water is hard or not, or (if your tap water is hard), it can be used as a workaround to get a good shave. That in fact is the point of the post.
Carbonate hardness can be removed by boiling water. This removes carbonate hardness compounds which are responsible for the scale that can form on pipes and water heaters.
Noncarbonate hardness compounds though won’t be removed by boiling the water, but noncarbonate hardness compounds are responsible for soap scum, which is a slimy residue…which could possibly act as a lubricant and enhance the shaving experience. Who knows? Could be an interesting experiment to try!
Boiling water will not remove the hardness minerals, as you say it may reduce them very slightly through precipitate but the water will still be hard overall. I find the effect of softened water to hugely affect the quality of my shaves. I imagine the difference is huge with soaps, but even as a shaving cream user, I find that it still makes a marked difference on the amount of drag I experience. I understand some people without softeners use rainwater, but that must be pretty inconvenient!