Two Months In: What Starting Wet Shaving Actually Looks Like

Two months in, shaving three times a week, and Frank already has the thing most new shavers take much longer to figure out.

“Technique over any other hardware or software,” he wrote in the group. “It simply is key.”

The Gear Trap

The pull toward new gear is real, and in wet shaving it’s almost universal. A better razor, a different soap, an aftershave that’s been sitting in the cart. The gear is genuinely fun. Buying something new also feels like progress when you’re still figuring out why some shaves land better than others.

It isn’t, always. A decent double-edge and a decent soap will do everything your face needs for years. What moves the outcome is technique. Blade angle - most beginners hold the razor too steep against the skin. Pressure - the natural tendency to push down rather than let the handle weight do the work. Grain direction - going against the grain before the first pass has prepped the skin. These are the variables. An expensive razor gets them wrong just as reliably as a cheap one until the muscle memory is there.

Building that memory takes repetition. Two months in, three times a week, Frank is roughly two dozen shaves in. He’s already identified the right lever. Not everyone gets there this early.

The Evening Reset

The other piece Frank described is harder to talk about without sounding like a magazine essay. But he put it plainly enough that it deserves the same plain treatment.

“Taking time, usually before bed to shave has given me pause to reflect quietly at the man in that mirror. It is something just to have a reset and to force me to slow down. Truly a treat to just take time for oneself with purpose and intent.”

He shaves before bed. The shave lands differently at night. The day is over. Nothing is pressing. Ten minutes with a brush and warm lather, no phone, nobody needing anything from you.

Christian in the comments shaves the same way.

Zen time. The act requires presence. You can’t be halfway somewhere else and also shave well. The attention the razor demands is what makes the ritual a reset. The focus is the point.

Morning shaving can have the same quality. But morning has its own agenda already pressing in. An evening shave ends the day deliberately rather than waiting for the day to just run out. That’s the difference Frank is describing.

Starting From Here

Frank mentioned something at the start of his post that’s easy to glide past: the group is slowly becoming one of his favorites. That’s how it works. The group is full of guys who were where Frank is now - two months in, figuring out why the blade angle matters more than the soap, discovering that the ten minutes before bed are their own kind of therapy.

The gear gets more interesting from here. A razor that suits how he holds things, soaps that earn a regular spot in the rotation, a routine that eventually stops requiring thought. The community piece - the photos, the discussions, the feedback loops - develops alongside the technique.

But what he has now is what holds everything else up. Technique is the skill to build. The ritual is the return on the time. Both take some shavers years to name. Two months in, Frank’s already there.