History
A rudimentary form of shaving cream was documented in Sumer around 3000 BC. This substance combined wood alkali and animal fat and was applied to a beard as a shaving preparation.
Until the early 20th century, bars or sticks of hard shaving soap were used. Later, tubes containing compounds of oils and soft soap were sold. Newer creams introduced in the 1940s neither produced lather nor required brushes, often referred to as brushless creams.
Soaps are used by wetting a shaving brush, which is made out of either boar hair or badger hair, and swirling the brush on the soap, then painting the face with the brush. Brushless creams do not produce a lather, thereby removing its ability to protect the skin against cuts. Traditional soaps are still available today from such makers as The Art of Shaving, Crabtree and Evelyn, Proraso and Geo. F. Trumper.
Read more about this topic: Shaving Cream
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The awareness that health is dependent upon habits that we control makes us the first generation in history that to a large extent determines its own destiny.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There is no history of how bad became better.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)