interesting, ive always wondered.
I too spend alot of money on sensor cartridges.
what are you using for cream?
I have a few different things I use. I have some cakes of traditional shave soaps, they seem expensive, at 10-12 dollars a puck, but I have two pucks that I haven't exhausted in two years of usage, so they're quite cheap in the long run. I also have a couple of creams, you can get these around town usually. Bath and Body Works sells an Italian shave cream under their rebranded name C.O. Bigelow. It's actually Proraso shave cream, made for straight razors and double edge razors, and it's excellent. Also, The Body Shop carries a Maca Root Shave Cream, and it's excellent also, and I've just discovered Kiss My Face brand creams, which based only on my using it today, seems to be plenty good. And finally the Art of Shaving creams are really pretty damn good as well. All of them will last you just fine, but you whip them up into a later with a shaving brush and apply them that way, instead of just spreading goo on your face from a can. One quality shaving brush can be had for as little as ten bucks (or up to 300 if you want to go super luxury) and will last you literally decades.
Gman, as for the strop, it's not used for sharpening exactly so much as maintaining the edge. Yes, you can kill the edge with one if you use it wrong, but it's not hard to learn. Plenty of videos on youtube showing you exactly how to do it properly. It's not that you can "fold" the edge over, but that it's so fine you'll blunt is very slightly. It'll still be sharper than any knife you've ever held or even heard of, but it'll pull your whiskers some instead of just slicing them off cleanly. It's easy to learn to strop correctly, I could show you in 5 minutes in person, though it might take marginally longer through watching videos. The key is not to put pressure, and to keep the spine flat on the strop. Lifting the spine of the razor off the strop is what does it.
