There has been something bothering me since I started wet shaving again and I see it come up regularly on forums such as badgerandblade and Reddit's own r/wicked_edge. The direction of hair growth in my beard is something which I've always assumed was very straight forward. In fact, I remember my dad telling me " you shave with the grain, so downwards on your face and upwards on your neck" when I started shaving in the mid 90s. Maybe that's how his growth comes in, but as I've recently found out... that trait was not passed down to me.
Maybe it's because of all my years on cartridge razors that I've never paid that much attention to growth direction, but having made the DE switch I've come to realise it is a very important variable in the quality of your shave.
I had assumed my beard grew as shown in the picture below. Up and down in nice, simple, symmetrical lines. Nope. It's possible that Auld Bob is blessed with such a coupon, but mine is nothing like it.
In an effort to examine this further, I decided to have a week of no shaving in order to see as well as feel the true nature of my growth. Day 4 arrived and with it the dreaded neck itch which has scuppered my previous attempts at growing a beard (though a fat man goatee is fine) so off to the shave den I went with my mirror and notepad. I mapped the results as shown below, and while I'm pleased that my hair grows rather symmetrically, it's a sad realisation that I've been shaving wrongly up until now.
As you can see this is a completely different scenario. My with-the-grain (WTG) passes on my cheeks and neck have actually been across-the-grain (XTG) and my across-the-grain passes have been against-the-grain (ATG). FML as they say.
I had an excited shave with this new knowledge... hoping for an even closer, even smoother shave. I printed out my map, stuck it to the mirror and ran my trusty R89 in the appropriate manner in a full on WTG, XTG, ATG assault. Surely this would be the greatest shave ever? No. This was not to be the case and I had a pretty average shave in which I even managed to give myself a decent nick on my upper lip. It could've been down to the fact that I was on shave #7 with an Israeli Personna but I'm not so sure. I think this will be harsh transition for me as I relearn my own face, but fingers crossed I can come out the other side with regular, repeatable BBS shaves.
Chris
Oh, the tool I used for creating the above images can be found here and is a very handy little resource.
Black hair, looks like you!
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