by Ross McMEEKIN

My pores need to be so damn ex­fo­li­at­ed that they’re in dan­ger of be­ing cor­doned off the De­part­ment of Fish and Wildlife for be­ing pris­tine wilder­ness. Con­gress has to be about to use tax dol­lars to start as­sign­ing of­fi­cers to my face, for pro­tec­tion. Vi­t­a­mins? I need Pro-Vi­t­a­mins. That’s should go with­out say­ing. Itch de­fense? Sta­tus quo. My face had bet­ter glow, like Moses’ beard­ed won­der when he strut­ted down from Mount Sinai. Post-ap­pli­ca­tion, my pores had bet­ter be so wide, so clean, so full of my nat­ur­al face oils that bac­te­ria fear to tread any­where but along their shores.

I’m get­ting ahead of my­self. Fa­cial creams are fur­ther along in the process. We’re talk­ing aisle 6B lat­er. Be­fore any ex­fo­li­a­tion, there’s the not-so-sim­ple mat­ter of shav­ing cream choice.

Most days the on­ly part of my skin peo­ple ever see is my face, which is why if my shav­ing cream doesn’t have that Skin Guard Tech­nol­o­gy, I won’t even pick it up off the shelf. I’m al­ways check­ing for that Skin Guard Tech­nol­o­gy. None of this Re­de­f­i­n­i­tion crap. My skin al­ready has an iden­ti­ty: El Jefe.

Sure, I want El Jefe to be firm and smooth, but that’s like say­ing I want my food to taste de­cent. Un­der­state­ment of the year. Af­ter shav­ing, my skin should be smoother than the buns of ba­by Je­sus, fresh from Mary via the loins of the Holy Ghost. My shav­ing cream needs to be guard­ing El Jefe’s pores with a vig­or akin to the Pri­o­ry of Sion’s pro­tec­tion of the Holy Grail. Will­ing to die for it.

Un­der­stand, I don’t want any of this jack-of-all-trades, king-of-none non­sense that some of those com­pa­nies put out. Would you hire Yn­g­wie Malm­steen to do your tax­es? No! You’d hire him to play at you back­yard bar­beque so that no one would ever mess with you again, be­cause their faces would be­come per­ma­nent­ly melt­ed, leav­ing them ashamed, while El Jefe would ob­vi­ous­ly per­se­vere through the mas­sive shred­ding with­out need­ing to pop out a bead of sweat. I want each cream — whether shav­ing, fa­cial, hand, foot or oth­er­wise — to tri­umph in do­ing what it was made to do, and noth­ing else. And for a shav­ing cream, the job is sim­ple. They need to guard El Jefe from the fury of the Quat­tro ra­zor, let­ting said ra­zor get on­ly close enough to El Jefe so as to prop­er­ly lift and cut the fol­li­cles. I’m not look­ing for any Aloe in my foamy good­ness. I don’t need any­thing quenched. If I want­ed some­thing to ther­a­peu­tic, I’d sit down with a stout bowl of Creamy Mac in one palm and a Coro­na in the oth­er for back-to-back episodes of Dr. Phil. No. None of this Re­nais­sance Shav­ing Cream bull­shit, try­ing to be all things to all peo­ple. That’s a recipe for dis­as­ter, in the form of lit­tle pieces of tis­sue pa­per try­ing to soak up blood from the wounds that Quat­tro made on El Jefe.

In short, a shav­ing cream’s role is this, and on­ly this: Guard. If it can’t han­dle that sim­ple task, I’m gone. On to the next shelf.

Filed under Commentary on November 19th, 2010

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