There's a lot to be said for growing a beard. If one lives in a northern clime, those bitter winter days can be made a bit less brutal with a woolly, face-covering layer of protein and keratin. Friends and relatives suddenly have new gift options—call it beard gear—when your birthday rolls around. And beards can provide the kids with another source of slightly fearful wonder about the hermetic mysteries of the adult world. ("Uncle John, did you really hide a family of mice in your beard when the cat was about to eat them? Did you?!")
For most of us, though, shaving remains just one of the daily chores that we love to hate. Wait, strike that "love" part. We hate it. Realizing that the options, however, boil down to maintaining some sort of facial hair (Abe Lincoln? Robert Bork? Dr. Weil? Major Burnside?) or sucking it up and shaving every day, the majority of men choose the latter, and end up not only enduring several minutes of face-scraping tedium each morning, but also razor burn, dry skin, and a plethora of after-effects.
That's where after shaves come in, of course, and a recent sampling of five brands suggested that help is most definitely out there.
Without exception, the after shaves I tested—Body Tools Repair and Protect ($29.50, labodytools.com), Origins for Men Fire Fighter Plus ($16.50, www.origins.com), Woody's Post Shave Rescue ($14.95, woodysgrooming.com), Lab Series Triple Benefit Post-Shave Remedy ($25, labseries.com), and Zirh Soothe ($30, zirh.com)—all performed pretty much as promised. My skin felt better and certainly less ravaged after I applied the various creams and gels, and the combination of standard moisturizers, solid SPF protection, and downright exotic ingredients (Irish moss extract, hemp, seaweed, ginseng) definitely helped both tone the skin and soothe that ever-annoying afterburn.
On top of all that, the Origins Fire Fighter Plus seemed to somehow soften my beard (as it claimed it would), making subsequent shaves quite suddenly more pleasant than the several thousand brief but intense razor-and-gel battles that had gone before.
None of the products were perfect, of course. The toothpaste-like scent of Body Tool's otherwise excellent Repair and Protect is a bit off-putting—not least because the light-blue lotion actually resembles toothpaste; the cutesy, nudge-nudge-wink-wink language on the Woody's tube is just stupid. ("Apply liberally to face, neck and/or areas we don't want to know about."); and Zihr Soothe's blue and silver packaging has a clinical vibe that suggests, oh, some vaguely embarrassing antimicrobial cream, rather than the high-quality "post shave solution" one finds inside.
For anyone who might have given after shaves a shot years ago, only to desist after those first few "bracing" alcohol-infused splashes, now's the time to try out some newer offerings. They might not be your father's after shaves—but hey, do you really want your skin to look the way your dad's did?
