Tonsorial Green: The Modern Barbershop Scent I Helped Soap Palooza Build

Howdy, and welcome back to A Texan Shaves. It’s been a hot minute since I put one of these together, long enough that it feels a little strange being back in front of the camera. But I’ve got one I’ve been promising you, so let’s get into it.

How Tonsorial Green Came Together

Now, the collaboration. This one’s been sitting in my head for months before I ever said a word about it to anybody. I had scent notes that just wouldn’t leave me alone, an idea for a dirty, dank, green barbershop scent with a touch of cannabis in it. I was even going to call it Dank Tonsorial.

Barbershop is such a broad category. Everybody’s got their own version of it, but there’s a baseline barbershop smell we all recognize, whether that’s Sterling or anybody else’s take on it. I wanted that familiar base, twisted into something more modern. So I took the idea to David at Soap Palooza and asked what he thought. He ran with it. We went through three rounds of samples, and when I got the first one back I realized it wasn’t just dark or dank, it had gone green on us. Not what I set out to make, but honestly, fantastic. We kept rolling with that and landed on the name Tonsorial Green instead.

That name change unlocked something bigger too. If there’s a Tonsorial Green, why not a Tonsorial Blue, a Tonsorial Aqua, a Tonsorial Black? A whole lineup of modern barbershops, one for every occasion. I don’t know if I’ll be part of all of them, David might bring in other people for the rest of the series, but Tonsorial Green is the first one out the door.

The Notes

Soap Palooza lists Tonsorial Green with top notes of pink grapefruit and green fig, a heart of aromatic geranium and green cannabis, and a base of clean oud, vetiver, and white musk. On paper, that’s a lot going on, and I know it sounds like it shouldn’t work. It does.

Fig gave us the most trouble by hand, down. It wanted to take over the first couple of samples. David reeled it back, I pushed to add a little here, pull a little there, and between the two of us we landed somewhere I’m genuinely proud of. If the cannabis note worries you, don’t let it. It reads as the plant and the flower, not like something out of a bag. It sits in there pretty well with everything else.

Tonsorial Green went up for sale at Soap Palooza’s store on September 26.

One more thing before I get into the shave: I’m biased. I helped make this. I don’t make a dime off it, but I had a hand in it, so take everything I say here with that in mind. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

The Hardware

Staying with the green theme, I used a Guerrilla aluminum razor, the .84 baseplate, I believe, in a dark green finish that matched the Tonsorial Green label about as well as anything in my den. Doug Lane gifted me this one, and it’s the same razor I used for a shave of the day a few days back.

For the brush, I pulled out a Chisel & Hound with a horsehair knot, one I hadn’t used in a while. Not quite as deep a green as the razor, but it fit the theme well enough, and I’ve got four or five horsehair knots sitting around that don’t get enough use.

The Shave

My skin didn’t have much to work with. That Guerrilla razor is efficient enough that two days after my last shave I barely had anything on my face. So we’re doing two passes, no third pass needed.

The lather built up thick and slick, creamy almost to the point of yogurt. The scent hits as straight barbershop first, then the cannabis and musk come forward, with that green fig running underneath the whole thing. Fig was the hard part in development, and you can tell. It never takes over; it just sits there giving the top a little lift.

The razor cut clean through two passes with zero irritation. Nothing to complain about there; that combo of razor and blade just works.

The splash is where everything opens up. That’s always where the real notes show themselves. The vetiver comes through strong here, more than I got off the soap, and the grapefruit adds a citrus brightness up top that sits against something a little darker underneath, almost like the bitter note you get at the back of your tongue with real grapefruit. It plays well against the cannabis and the oud. No complaints, no irritation, just a good, clean finish to a shave I was looking forward to for months.

I put more of myself into this fragrance than any other collaboration I’ve worked on. David did the hard part, turning it into something real, and I think what we landed on together, and what it might open up for a whole series down the line, is something special. If any of you have ideas for where this barbershop line should go next, David’s the one to tell.

Thanks for watching. Go check out that giveaway link for Barb and Dave’s ride, get yourself into the Shave Dad group drawing, and give Tonsorial Green a shot if any of this sounds like your kind of scent.