SOTD - OCtober 2020

[120inna55]

The Club | The Graveyard
Leo Frilot Tru-Stone Hallows | AP Shave Co. SilkSmoke 28mm
Durham-Enders | Enders Speed Shaver | Schick Proline B-20

The Club's The Graveyard is VIP member exclusive, and as you might have guessed is a Halloween-themed set.  The fragrance is a very chilly anise-centered one that swells to an elegant woody lavender. This is all eventually grounded in earthy vetiver and cedar, but the anise sustains throughout the shave.  The splash is similar, but there's a transient sharp, bitter citrus in the beginning before the even more prominent anise takes over.  The dry down eventually burns off the anise, leaving the vetiver and resinous cedarwood.

While this is a pleasant fragrance, the soap base is the real reason to pick this up.  It seems like Ariana & Evans just debuted the Kaizen base, and they've already upgraded it to a second iteration dubbed "K2".  Kaizen is one of the best soap bases available, having mastered all benchmarks of what makes an elite soap (ease of loading/lather, density, primary and residual slickness, and post-shave).  I'm often skeptical when a new recipe comes right on the heels of an introductory product.  Can it be that much different?  With respect to K2, the answer is yes.  Slickness got notably slicker.  The post-shave of Kaizen is stellar.  K2 inexplicably improves upon that to a level I did not think possible.

I've long abandoned the concept of assigning a leader board among the elite artisanal soap bases, but I will say that among the uber-performance soaps I'm using, none outperform K2.