Category Archives: Friends

Rocky Mountain Barber Company’s Unscented Beard Oil, 1 oz.

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The Rocky Mountain Barber Company also has variously scented and unscented beard oils. I selected the unscented beard oil because of my positive experiences with their balms and that they had the packaging, the rubber dropper, that made sense. This is genuinely unscented, there is almost no scent to this product whatsoever. The bottle is a Brown Glass Boston Bottle and should be what the Beardoholic folks switch to for product packaging.

This is an excellent beard oil, and I use it when I want the benefits of the oil without a strong scent that would otherwise clash with either my fragrance choice or my balm choice. The Honest Amish Beard Oil goes well with some of the warmer more woodsy scented balms whereas this one, the Rocky Mountain Unscented works well with the citrus or soapy scented balms. While I love exploring the scents in these products, having a good option that is totally unscented will always be in my beard-care kit.

Rocky Mountain Barber Company’s Cedarwood Beard Balm, 2 oz.

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The Rocky Mountain products hail from Niagara Falls, Ontario. They are the only ones that aren’t made in the USA. The tin is a standard aluminum one, with two ounces of the product inside. Labels on the front and rear with the full product description. The balm is wax-based and about the same viscosity as the Reuzel Balm.

The scent is piney, intense notes of cedar and citrus and is quite sharp. This balm is my third favorite of all of the balms, and it did not suffer the same glitch that the Reuzel appeared to have from the factory, the wax was glossy to start with. It was this balm that after I applied it the first time gave me a little bit of a tingle as it was brushed through my beard. The tingle was brief and was not unpleasant, but it was remarkable in that it is the only product that tingles after application. Perhaps there is an ingredient that is acidic or astringent, I don’t know.

This was also the first departure from USA products, and the Canadians make a product to be proud of. Everything I have purchased so far all clearly states that none of it is tested on animals. I couldn’t endure the thought of a rabbit covered in the product and examined. I would instead test it myself and deal with whatever consequences come from the trial. The label, “Not tested on animals” is one of those marks that are deal-breakers for me, if the mark isn’t there, I won’t buy it.

Honest Amish Premium Beard Oil, 2 oz.

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The Honest Amish Premium Beard Oil is next. This is one of the beard oils I use routinely. The scent screams woodshop. The notes in the scent are sawdust, the warm smell of metal saw blades and a very weak burned resin. I humorously regard this one as “An exploding lumber yard.” The oil is quite darker than anything else I’ve used and might slightly alter the white in my beard and bring out a very slight yellow tint, but I’ve never thought that a negative.

Honest Amish again delivers more product for similar cost than any of their competitors. They ship double the product for almost the same price. I seem to vacillate between applying the beard oil by hand, versus dropping the oil on my brush and using the brush to apply it. I don’t know if there is a difference in application styles, but I do think that applying it by hand seems to be a more thorough method. There doesn’t appear to be any consensus online either, as I have searched in vain numerous times.

Once the bottle at work is exhausted, I intend to rotate the Honest Amish in and carry it around with me as my go-to beard oil choice.

Beardoholic Unscented Beard Oil 1 oz.

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The Beardoholic Unscented Beard Oil, in the 1-ounce bottle, came damaged from Amazon. Beardoholic appears to use aluminum caps on both their bottles and tins and for some reason, the materials always seem to come from the factory bent, warped or buckled. There is little if any scent to discuss about this product, beyond the smell of some of the component oils, which are ever so slightly vegetal or woodsy, if at all.

I started using this beard oil a few times during the day but quickly grew tired of the bottle assembly. It came with an aluminum cap that was buckled from distribution if not from the factory, and so it would never retain a seal. It did not leak, but it also did not fully seat properly. There was an inner plastic dropper-hole cap, with a small plastic plug and after five or six times putting it on and taking it off, it started to warp and ultimately I had to throw the little plug away because it could no longer seal to the dropper-hole it was mated to. After about half of the oil was used, I noticed small spots of leakage, so I resolved to transfer the contents to some other bottle. This created a new comedy of errors and a life lesson on cheap scale problems for consumers. What I wanted was a Boston Bottle, brown glass, with a certain thread count and density. I learned more about bottle choices trying to fix this problem than I ever meant to. As it turns out, you cannot merely order anything like this in one piece increments. You can find lots of people to sell you exactly what you want, a brown-glass Boston Bottle with 20/400 thread with a rubber top and glass pipette. What you can’t find is anyone willing to sell it to you in counts less than 500. So, if you want to fix this one problem, you have to buy 500 glass bottles to fix just one. It’s thoroughly absurd. I have moved away from Beardoholic as a brand, not because of their product, but because of their packaging. It was the first beard oil I tried, and it was a challenge to use. In the end, I did more shopping online and discovered that many other manufacturers use rubber-top/glass-pipette bottles, which I find to be incredibly more pleasant to use. In the end, I ended up at of all places, Hobby Lobby. They were the only ones I could find that had bottles like what I was looking for, and even still, I had to buy a set of three. The cost was almost nothing, but even today, I have two unused bottles in my cupboard that I will likely never ever use since I only needed the one.

I have resolved to use up the Beardoholic Unscented Beard Oil and keep it at work. In a few more days there will be nothing of it left, and I will wash the bottle and store it away as supplies. I don’t think I will be buying any more Beardoholic products, not when their packaging is so weak, or shipping is so strangely rough on them. The quality of the product that I don’t doubt and I do think it a good choice, but only when they address their bent, warped, buckled, and odd options for their products to be shipped in. When your customer has to rebottle your product, that’s not really all that great.

Honest Amish Beard Balm 2 oz.

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The Honest Amish Beard Balm is next up in my beard product review series. This product is shipped in a two-ounce tin, aluminum again, with just a product identification sticker on the front and nothing on the rear. It’s not nearly as wide as the standard tin shape, but it is deeper. The remarkable thing about Honest Amish is its low viscosity. The balm is loose, more of a kind of paste than a wax. This at first, was something I had to learn to adapt to, as the usual method of extracting product led to way too much product being used. The technique is the same, except the force used is much less. For Honest Amish, you have to be gentle because it’s so loose.

Honest Amish took a while for me to get used to, and a little bit longer to like. The scent is powerful, almost overpowering scents of clove and pumpkin and other likewise warmer scents. It is not bracing, cutting, or belting but rather smooth and crafty. As it isn’t a wax but a paste it doesn’t take much manual working to get it warmed up or slick to apply, but it does do its job very well. Over time I started to like the strong difference in the scent and began to humorously regard it as an “exploding pumpkin pie factory.”

While it is one of the stronger scented balms, it is not one of my favorites. It is satisfactory, and they certainly give you quite a lot for your money, and Honest Amish is apparently very well perceived by many online. Their ingredient lists match a lot of the other balms, so if you like pumpkin pie or clove scents, this will rock your world.

Reuzel Beard Balm 1.3oz

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The first reviewed product in my beard series is what I started with, this was used by my barber, and at first, we didn’t know what it was, but that it left an intoxicating scent behind. Over time, we did discover that it was Reuzel. The balm comes in a stout aluminum tin, in the standard shape and presentation of most of the balms, about two inches across, with the lid that screws on and off to present the product inside. The product itself is hard and waxy at room temperature, the first ingredient is shea butter, and the second ingredient is beeswax.

Reuzel was the first product that either of us experienced, and was what our barber used when we first got started growing our beards. First and foremost, this balm is my top choice, it is my favorite because the scent is inexplicably awesome. There is a mild but consistent manufacturing glitch that many customers have noticed, and our barber told us about before we even got started using it. Reuzel comes from the factory in somewhat of a grainy set. The wax comes in a manner of speaking, crystallized. It improves immensely when you gently warm the container, melt the wax to liquid and then let it set naturally by itself over time. I’ve discovered that the best way to do this for us is to open the new tin and put it on a candle warmer for a short while. When it’s fully melted, then carefully move it to a cool spot, and lid it. After that, it’s perfect. The scent is the first draw, then the quality. I got started using balms and oils early, so I’ve never known beard-itching-phase or beardruff at all.

Reuzel is my #1 favorite, and so I think I’ll always have some on hand. There was a previous blog post, Speed vs. Accuracy, where Amazon royally screwed up starting from distribution all the way through to shipping on this particular product. So for a brief while, getting this product from Amazon was somewhat of a challenge. To be very clear, I could also have bought it from my barber as well, and skipped out on all the frustration, too. It’s just a lesson about Amazon. They have a lot of products, but they don’t really know a lot about their products, at least not enough to mis-sticker 1.3-ounce container on a four-ounce container and notice something isn’t quite right.

The scent is quite something, there are notes of slate, talc, old books, with hints of leather. It isn’t strong at all in terms of perfumey, or cologney presentation, and is laidback. The scent lasts for about an hour or so once it’s applied, and never ceases to make me happy when I work it through my beard. The way I was taught to take from the container was to run my thumbnail along the surface and scrape up enough to cover the thumb. Then work it in my hands until it is warmed and slick. Almost all of the products that I will review share this method except for two, a squeeze tube one, and a different balm.

Beard Product Review Series

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The next few series of blog posts will all be about the ever-growing pile of beard-care products that I have amassed since I was inspired by Scott to give my beard another shot. I also must clearly declare that I couldn’t have pulled this off, a beard I am proud of, without the help of my barber, Junior. Sitting in a simple chair, one afternoon, and learning more about beard care in half an hour than I knew up to that point. Whenever I learn something new, that’s mightily important! It seems that these days so few things are honestly new anymore.

The structure of the reviews will cover the name of the product as the headline, how I got the product, and then a descriptive paragraph where I will include the packaging, the presentation, and some roughly quantitative measures like texture and viscosity. After the facts, then I will cover some of the more subjective qualitative measures of each product. I haven’t run into anything that I want to bin, yet, but likely if I do bin something it’s going to be a warning post definitely.

So, on to the first review, which would be the first product that I tried…

Favorite Things

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As I grow older I find simple pleasures sometimes have a resonance that I previously discounted. The younger me never thought very much about hobbies, pursuits, and things I could do all by myself as being worthy. But then age started to creep up on me, I’m 43 years old now, soon to be 44 years old.

The things I enjoy now fill me with a certain considerable thrill. I’m taking care of myself. I call it self-care and it’s very good for me. It also fills me with a twinge of regret, that I didn’t pursue this when I was younger. The past is window dressing and set design, so we don’t spend any time or energy on it. You cannot change the past, you can just forget it. A funny touch of irony is that as you frequently access memories, you damage them, so a painful memory left in the dark and never recalled is fresh, while a memory that is replayed and remembered has more resemblance to Frankenstein’s Monster than a real memory. Each time you dig up the past, you start stapling new things to it. Funny that the way to destroy the past is to pick it up, drop it, and pick it up again. Recall it, frequently. You can enhance this effect by starting to drag creativity into it as well. Perhaps an awkward conversation was awkward because you were wearing clown shoes? Maybe. Over time, the doubt that they weren’t clown shoes erodes and you’ve turned your painful memory into an absurdity. In the end, there is less and less emotional resonance with absurdity and the memory dies. Getting back to the present is the key, in fact, it’s only in the present that you can really live. The future won’t happen the way you think it will, the universe is perverse in that manner.

The things I enjoy now are taking care of myself. Being possessive of my time, what I spend it on, and selecting people in my life that are important. Important for me to be in their lives, or them to be in mine. All of life is an elaborate script, with people dancing on stage, cavorting for a time, and then dancing off, exeunt stage left, pursued by a bear. I’ve recently come into new projects, and one of them is growing this beard. It’s a feature, it’s a project, it’s a hobby. I never thought I would do this again, the hair coming in super curly and having to put up with the commentary on my appearance. Perhaps age has led me to a kinder growth pattern, or perhaps it is hormonal, as I age. But I am truly and madly enjoying the feeling of having it, and the occupation of caring for it. Nothing quite like enjoying a thuroughly strenuous workout, getting squeaky clean afterwards, and then sitting back with a glass of fine bourbon on the rocks while I slowly work beard oil in with my boars hair brush. Twinges of itch fading as the oil moisturizes both my skin and my new facial feature. What used to be wiry and chaotic is now soft and orderly. I haven’t found the silver bullet that does it all for me, but I have found many excellent efforts. These options have created a new pursuit, a new hobby. Every day it’s something new, different combinations of balms and oils, and if you get close enough, you might catch a scent that already has gotten compliments. I think that it might be one of the most unexpected parts of this entire thing, patently that nobody really bats an eye at me with such a prominent feature now, but that they comment on the scent without really understanding what it is. They enjoy it, and that makes me chuckle with satisfaction.

The older I get, the more I wish I had started sooner. I suppose the only real advice I could give anyone who was seeking it would be an appeal to the Golden Rule, and to start as young as you can with jealous levels of self-care. Nobody really will care for you as much as you will care for yourself. Find things that put a bounce in your step, make you look forward to the mornings, the afternoons, and your evenings. Things that don’t involve other people to play the part of gatekeeper, but within yourself be the gateless gate. Don’t seek happiness from without, but rather assert happiness from within and kindle the flames as best you can with your own efforts. We all have firewood, metaphorically speaking, and many of us have a rain-soaked woodpile that refuses to burn. You can’t really start a fire even with kindling unless you spend a lot of time either holding the flame to the wood or drying it out. The only way to dry your kindling is by keeping it covered and letting the air get to it. In this metaphor, life only gives you what you can handle, when your woodpile or your kindling is nice and dry.

The ice is nearly gone, the bourbon is nearly out and there is little more the brush can do other than scratch the itching that growth like I have sometimes brings about. Find something you love, cultivate it, and respect life for what it was always meant to be, to quote Brandon Sanderson in his Stormlight Archive books, one of the most fundamental ideals is Journey before Destination. Spend a while with that little phrase, see where it takes you.

Oathbringer – 84%

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I’m 84% of the way along reading Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson. So far the read has been a slow go, as he is setting up a lot of backstory and covering a lot of characterization. I don’t mind it, and it’s nowhere near the level of setting work that Stephen King is known for, so I am thankful for that. The twist near the end is quite good, and reminds me, yes Virginia, Hell is Other People.