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WetShaving
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This is a community of enthusiasts, hobbyists and artisans who enjoy a traditional wet shave: brush, soap, and safety or straight razor. We are a part of the WetShaving community found on Reddit, Discord, and IRC.
New subscribers welcome!
Please visit our wiki, which is always and forever a work in progress.
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Posts must have sufficient content to generate a meaningful discussion.
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Use [First Impressions] in the title if your experience with the product is limited.
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Use the [Review] in the title if you can provide comprehensive details with enough familiarity to answer follow-up questions.
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Disclose how the product being reviewed was acquired (e.g., PIF, loan, or purchase). If the product was provided to you directly by the maker or vendor free of charge or at a discount, you must disclose this fact even if the item will later be returned to the maker or vendor.
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founded 2 years ago
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Shaving cups are nothing new. Not even in 1901, when George M Müller^1^ filed and got a patent for a less messy version. Not that I find my shaving mugs, cups, and bowls to get messy – but these days most people don’t keep their soaps in the cups.
We’ve looked at several improved shaving mugs or cups already. Including ones to keep your soap from getting gross, and ones that allowed you to drain them without the soap falling out. But George did one better by making sure there would be no^2^ sticky annular deposit of soap along the edges. And less wasted soap too.
Patent drawing from US patent 688,259
George did this by not only having a perforated plate between the soap and the brush, as – apparently – was the style of the times, but by having a gasket on the plate between the soap and brush.
The brush would be lathered through the holes in the plate. As the soap was worn away, the pressure from the brush would push the plate down.^3^ Which would make your shaving cup less messy, allegedly.
Or as the patent explains it:
Lather is formed by moistening the brush in the ordinary way and moving it quickly over the openings d3. Soap sufficient for the purpose is readily caught up. as the soap wears away it or the plate is turned to bring previously unaffected parts beneath the openings, and as the surface of the soap is worn away the pressure of the brush causes the plate to follow that surface downwardly. The packing fully prevents the water employed from reaching the soap around the edges of the plate, and the cup is much more easily kept clean.
Unsurprisingly there is several things to poke at here. There is the inherent trouble of making a gasket that is tight enough to be waterproof, yet loose enough to let the pressure from the brush push it down. There is the absolute necessity that the ‘barrel’ of the shaving cup is completely cylindrical – even if mugs are easier to free from their moulds if there is a slight taper to the insides. And then there is the fact that the idea is unlikely to work well.
Unless you would get a near prefect seal between soap and plate, water will seep through and collect in the lower part of the cup. And the gasketed plate would make it hard to get it out again – thus turning your soap into a mushy mess. And your less messy shaving cup into a more messy shaving cup.
You can read the full patent for George M Müller’s less messy shaving cup at Google Patents.
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Residing at Brooklyn, in the county of Kings and state of New York – but clearly of German extraction if the name is an indication.
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Or less, at least.
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This implies that George used a brush with a lot of backbone…
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Share your shave of the day!
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Retractable brushes is nothing new. A combined multi-position shaving brush with a built in lather rubber device? That’s more unusual.
Patented by Leon Tobias in 1920, the brush was – of course – touted as a new and improved shaving brush. In the words of the patent:
This invention relates to improvements in shaving brushes, an object of the invention being to provide a shaving brush equipped with the ordinary bristles for forming and distributing lather and also provided with means for rubbing the lather into the face to soften the heard, the parts so constructed and arranged as to permit either the bristles or the rubbing device to be exposed for use at the end of suitable handle.
The device itself is reasonable simple in hindsight. Most of the handle is a sleeve, in which a cylindrical knot-holder can slide. A nub on the knot holder sticks out through a slot in the outer sleeve. The nub – or a screw – can engage one of several notches in the slot.
Patent drawing for US patent 1,358,597
By nudging the nub from one notch to the next, the loft of the brush can be adjusted. And with the knot all the way back, the lather rubber device is available to, well, rub lather.
The lather rubber device is a rubber disk with multiple projections. Today we would likely make this out of silicon. The idea was that you could rub the lather rubber - the rubberer? – over your face to work the lather into your skin and stubble. Which should be – according to the patent – safer than using your fingers?
This practice of softening the heard is commonly carried out by rubbing the lather into the face with the fingers and when this operation is performed by a barber or other person, it is extremely unsanitary and more or less dangerous. By providing a device such as above explained, it is not necessary for the barber or other operator to touch the face with his fingers and the massaging and heard softening operation can be easily and quickly performed in a sanitary manner.
Now, call me a luddite if you like, but if the thought was that having your barber massage the lather in was unsanitary… perhaps it would be easier for the barber to wash their hands between customers?
Which is not to say that Leon’s invention is pointless. I can definitely see a modern brush like this offered as a combined shaving brush and face massages / exfoliator. My pre-shave routine includes a good wash with a rough wash-tosh, and this could make a decent stand-in for that when traveling.
You can read the full text for Leon’s combined three positioned shaving brush and lather rubber at Google Patents.
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