Tag Archives: violet

Queen Charlotte Soaps – Green Irish Tweed type shaving cream

12 Friday Jul 2013

Posted by in American, Cream, Queen Charlotte Soaps

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QCS - GIT Cream

Today’s review is of Queen Charlotte Soaps’ Green Irish Tweed shaving cream. Now, I’ve reviewed their GIT soap before, and found it to be somewhat lacking, especially in scent strength. This fared better.

The cream’s lather was pretty good; fairly thick for a cream, it lathered up with a bit of elbow grease to something with a good balance of thickness and lather slickness, with a fairly wide “sweet spot” for acceptable water content to pull this off.

The scent seemed like a pretty decent Green Irish Tweed imitation (keeping in mind that I’ve never smelled the actual stuff!). For those who don’t know the scent, here’s how QCS describes it:

This is our rendition of Green Irish Tweed, the cologne created by Creed that is a favorite among the famous and royalty. With top notes of lemon and verbena, middle notes of iris and violet leaves, and base notes of Mysore sandalwood and ambergris, Green Irish Tweed smells refined and sophisticated.

Now, back to the soap version of the stuff, I could barely detect any scent whatsoever. This stuff is far better in that regard. This isn’t to say that it’s a strong scent, mind you, but at least you can tell it’s there, albeit with a fair amount of fading during the course of the shave.

  • 8/10 Scent Pleasantness
  • 7/10 Scent Strength
  • 8/10 Lather Quality

All in all, it’s a decent enough if rather middle of the road cream. Not outstanding in any aspect, but it doesn’t fall flat anywhere either. 7/10 overall.

Gear used:

Ingredients: Water, saponified stearic acid, glycerin, saponified tallow, palm oil, olive oil, and coconut oil, aloe vera extract, fragrance oil, kaolin clay, phenoxyethanol (and) caprylyl glycol, vitamin E.

Geo F. Trumper – Violet shaving cream

24 Saturday Nov 2012

Posted by in British, Cream, Geo F Trumper

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I found Geo F Trumper’s violet cream to be really lacking in slickness. To the point that upon my initial pass, having lathered it up to what usually works quite well for a consistency from most soaps, the razor was “skipping” across my cheek. More and more water eventually managed to wrest something usable out of it, but at the cost of what I consider to be an unacceptable degradation in lather thickness. All in all, it gave what I would consider to be a mediocre shave. And yes, if you’re keeping track, I do think this problem was worse than what I encountered with my last Trumper’s cream review.

The scent is, well, violets. Sweet and floral, I do kinda like it, although I recognize that there’s a lot of guys out there who would consider it to be far too feminine of a scent. As I said, I kind of like it, but I’ll give it a few bonus points for truth in advertising; if you’re looking for something that smells like violets, this smells like violets, and I can’t really ding it just based upon the fact that I’m not ecstatic about the aroma of violets.

But, as for the strength of the scent, it’s middling. As per usual, it’s quite strong in the pot, but when lathered up it loses a lot of its potency. It’s still there during the shave, but only just so.

So, overall, I’d say it’s a 4/10. The shave was sub-standard, and the scent isn’t good enough / potent enough to rescue it.

  • Cost: I got the sample shown free along with one of my purchases to Italianbarber.com, as Joe often does with reasonably sized orders. A 200g pot goes for $29.99 and a 75g travel tube is $17.95.

Gear used:

Ingredients: Aqua (water), Stearic Acid, Myristic Acid, Potassium Hydroxide, Coconut Acid, Glycerin, Parum (fragrance), Triethanolamine, Sodium Hydroxide, Methylparaben, Propylparaben, CI 19140 (FD&C Red 33), CI 42090 (FD&C Blue 1), Alpha-Isomethyl Ionone, Citronellol, Eugenol, Hexyl Cinnamal, Hydroxycitronellal, Butylphenyl Methylpropional