Here’s a quick post, just to show how my top hat looks now that I’ve polished it. To polish a silk top hat, you use velvet (and preferably wet the hat), and just brush the hat anticlockwise with the velvet. This aligns the silk so it all lies flat and parallel, giving a better shine.

Compared, here’s the photo of the hat before the polish.

Unfortunately, my top hat has slight structural damage (due to having being knocked before I bought it – there are a few lumps and bumps on the structure underneath the silk, and now that the silk lies flat it’s more visible. This can be repaired, but I’ll have to get it done professionally by Patey’s Hats in London. You can see one of these lumps on the middle of the left side of the hat in the top photo.

Emmie bought me a new safety razor a few days ago. It’s an English 1930s Gillette in the original case. I haven’t tried it yet, but it feels great rolled around in my hand. A little heavier than my first razor.

My hat collection is growing and growing, despite having sold two hats. I’ve recently got two more hats, and have another hat and a cap coming soon.

Here is my current collection:

Top Hat
	Saying you don’t look good in a hat is like saying you don’t look good in shoes!
Bowler Hat	Homburg
Black Fedora	Black Trilby
Beige Trilby	Brown Fedora

When you watch old television shows, films, or read old books, sometimes fathers teaching their sons how to shave crops up. I grew up without my father, and just learnt to shave the way most people do nowadays – trial and error, with a cheap plastic razor and some cheap artificial soap in a can. I always wondered why fathers ever bothered teaching their sons, as it’s so easy to learn. Eventually, I read about wet shaving with a safety razor, and it made sense that sons got taught – it’s much harder to do.

I wanted to learn to shave with a safety razor, as I enjoy ritual and older ways of doing things, but had no safety razor to try with. However, Emmie found a safety razor & shaving brush for me at a flea market around 6 weeks ago. I already had a safety razor case as a gift from Emmie’s mum, and I dug it out and the razor fit perfectly.

With the use of the interweb I managed to date the razor to the early 70s, but the case and blades (there were a lot included – I won’t be using them though, as they’re 80 years old) are from the 20s. The razor is wonderful, but doesn’t the case just look amazing? Why would you want to use a modern plastic thing when you can have something like this?

It takes a little longer to shave this way, but it’s absolutely worth it. The close shave a safety razor gives is unparalleled by any method short of a cut-throat razor and it’s wonderful to your skin (unlike a modern razor with 4-5 blades, which causes many men so much irritation). Emmie hates it when I use it as she’s afraid of it – they use raw razor blades, and it’s much easier to cut yourself with one.

Shaving with a safety razor is quite different to modern shaving – you do need to get a proper, traditional shaving soap that you lather up with a brush and lots of water, and you need blades and a razor, which is a high cost up front compared to modern shaving, but in the long run it’s worth it. The only waste is some soap down the sink and a solid metal blade, which you can recycle. On top of that, the soap lasts so much longer – you use a toothpaste sized amount of soap, and I estimate my current soap will last well over a year. The blades are incredibly cheap (I recently bought 35 razor blades for less than the cost of an 8 pack of Mach 3 blades). On top of all that, you get an incredibly close shave. I’d recommend it to anybody that wants to give it a go.