Almost every new wet shaver asks the same question in their first week. The tub or the tube? Both build lather with a brush, both work with any safety razor, and both will out-perform canned foam. The difference is in how much work they ask of you, how long they last, and how forgiving they are while you are still learning.
Buy a cream first. It lathers in seconds, it is difficult to get wrong, and it will teach you what a good lather feels like without much practice. Move to a soap once you know what you are aiming for, because a soap will usually cost you less per shave and last a great deal longer.
A shaving cream is soft. You can scoop it with a fingertip or press the brush straight into it, and it is often sold in a tube, a tub or a pump bottle. A shaving soap is firm. It ranges from a semi-soft paste you can dent with a thumb through to a hard puck that feels like a bar of soap and barely gives at all.
That firmness is the whole story. A soft product releases its lather quickly with very little brush work. A hard product has to be worked loose by the brush before it will build, which takes longer but tends to produce a denser lather with more cushion once it gets going.
With a cream, a brush-tip amount is usually enough. Wet the brush, shake it out, load for ten or fifteen seconds and build on the face. It comes up fast and it is hard to under-load.
With a hard soap, expect thirty seconds or more of loading, a wetter brush, and a bit of patience while the lather goes through its ugly airy stage before it turns glossy. If you have never watched that happen, our guide on building the perfect shaving lather walks through the stages.
Your brush matters here as well. A boar or a stiffer synthetic will dig a hard puck out faster than a soft badger, which is worth knowing before you blame the soap. We covered the differences in our guide to traditional shaving brushes.
This is where soaps pull ahead. A cream is used up faster because you take more of it per shave, and creams are usually sold in smaller quantities. A hard soap puck of 100 ml or 120 g can run for many months of daily shaving because you are only lifting a thin layer off the surface each time.
At the extreme end, the Cella Milano semi-soft tallow block is sold in a 1 kg brick. It is the same product Italian barbershops work from, and split into a smaller tub it will outlast almost anything else on the shelf.
People blame the soap when the problem is usually the water. Creams are more tolerant because they carry more water to begin with. Hard soaps need you to add water in stages, and in a hard water area they can feel stubborn no matter how good the technique is. If your lather keeps collapsing or drying out on the face, read how to get a good shaving lather in hard water before you replace the soap.
Some Italian products are described as a soap cream, or croap. They are soft enough to load like a cream but built like a soap, so you get quick loading with more of a soap-style lather. The TFS Barbose Pomeriggio is a good example, and it is a sensible middle route if you cannot decide.
Soaps travel better. A puck in a screw-top tub cannot leak, and a shave stick like the Taconic Urban Woods stick can be rubbed straight onto a wet face, which removes the bowl from your bag entirely. Creams in tubes are fine in a wash bag, but a tub of cream can be pushed around in transit and pump bottles take up space.
At home, let either one dry out with the lid off after a shave. Sealing damp product away is the main reason a tub goes off before it is finished.
If you are coming straight from canned foam, start with a cream. Something like the Cella Riserva Fresco lathers easily and gives you a fair reference point for what dense lather should look like.
If you already lather comfortably and you want the tub to last, go to a soap. A tallow soap such as The Goodfellas Smile Tallow N1 builds a thick lather with real cushion, while a vegetable-based soap like the Parker sandalwood and shea butter soap is lighter and loads more easily.
If fragrance is not for you, unscented options exist in both formats.
Wish4Blades has been shipping wet shaving supplies from Montreal since 2004. The full range sits under shaving soaps and creams, split into shave soaps and shaving creams, with Cella Milano, The Goodfellas Smile, Taconic Shave, TFS, Officina Artigiana, GROOM and Parker between them. We ship across Canada and internationally.
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