eShave After Shave Soother

by tfowler

So much attention (and rightfully so, in most cases) is spent on the aftershave when it comes to traditional wet shaving.  Besides adding a bit of scent (sometimes), aftershaves help reduce irritation, prevent razor burn, and heal nicks and cuts.  I’ve come across more lotion type and more liquid type aftershaves, and the eShave aftershave is a lotion.

This particular aftershave is scentless and designed for sensitive skin.  It doubles as a moisturizer, too, which makes it pleasant, and you could use it to moisturize your face in a pinch.  As far being scentless, that much is true – there’s no discernible scent to the lotion at all.  That’s an obvious plus if you want to avoid scents (as I do), but it would also be great if you use colognes and don’t want to mingle scents.  So, if you’re looking for a scentless aftershave, this works for you.

As far as actual aftershave qualities, yep, it works as well.  It soothes the skin – hey, you just dragged a metal blade across your face, it might need some smoothing, and moisturizes as well.  It helps deal with small nicks.  I’ve had it in my dopp kit for some time.  I should also add that a tiny bit of this aftershave goes a long way – the bottle I have has lasted me months and months.

Now, all that said, I did come across a minor gripe with the eShave aftershave.  The typical post-shave routine is cold water to close pores and wake you up, alum to close nicks and cuts, aftershave, enjoy your day.  When I started using this aftershave, that’s what I did.  I noticed that the aftershave seemed to be clumping up, making this pebble-like beads on my face and not absorbing.  I thought this might have something to do with temperature change – I shave at the gym, toss everything in my gym bag, toss the gym bag in my car.  Perhaps something was happening to the aftershave with all this temperature change?

I contacted eShave directly to ask.  Let me interject here with something – eShave has some of the best customer service I’ve encountered in the industry of dandy things.  They replied quickly, and kept in communication with me until the problem was solved.  In their guess, it wasn’t the temperature, but that I was using it after alum.  It appears that there’s something in the lotion that just doesn’t mix well with the alum – it causes it to clump up and become nonabsorbent.  The fix was to change the routine: shave, alum, rinse with cold water, aftershave.  Now, that’s no big deal at all, really, but it would be nice if they could science around this problem.

Right now, I have two primary aftershaves – the eShave, and another that’s more of a liquid than a lotion (I use the Proraso white).  Both serve me very well.

eShave After Shave Lotion

eShave After Shave Lotion: 4/5

tl;dr: Excellent for sensitive skin, no real scent to it. Just make sure you rinse off alum before you apply.