Viking Revolution Beard Balm, 2oz.

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The last review for the Viking Revolution Sandalwood has almost the same nature as this balm. The packaging is a stout aluminum canister, much like all the others. It resists warping and crushing so the packaging is one of the more reliable in all the balms I have. There are labels on the front and back, and this balm is made in China, like the previously reviewed Sandalwood one. The consistency is identical to the main body of balms as well, waxy at room temperature, not as loose as the Amish, not as hard as the Reuzel. The price point for all the Viking Revolution balms are the same, about $10 for two ounces.

The scent for this balm carries very light citrus and orange note. It’s as faint as the Sandalwood scent is strong. All the Viking Revolution products are cruelty-free, not tested on animals. That is one of the most respectable and consistent features across the entire spectrum of beard care products and something I appreciate. I would consider this balm to be a standby, much like the Sandalwood one, and shares the third place in my rankings of favorite balms.

Viking Revolution Sandalwood Beard Balm 2 oz.

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Nearly all of the balms and oils I have reviewed so far have all been made either in Canada or the USA. The Viking Revolution products were all made in China. I wasn’t expecting one of my absolute favorites to be an outlier. The tin is made of aluminum, with labeling on the front and the back. The consistency is similar to the main body of the products I use, not as stiff as the Reuzel and not as loose as the Honest Amish, but right in the middle. It is the consistency of wax more than paste.

The first thing I noticed about this particular item was the scent. It’s intoxicating! The Sandalwood is warm, spicy, and very strong. The smell doesn’t last quite as long as I was expecting, maybe at most an hour. Each of these balms took a little bit to get used to, but this particular one is my #2 favorite right behind the original Reuzel Balm. The Viking Revolution Sandalwood Balm has also been one of only a few that elicited direct compliments as people wanted to know what fragrance I was using. I don’t know if other balms are equally as, but the Sandalwood has definitely left a positive impression on others when I use it.

The price-point for the Sandalwood Balm is about $10 for 2 ounces, so they definitely are the masters of the best bang for your buck right along with Honest Amish.

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…

Dodgy Clouds

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The recent outage in the Google Cloud infrastructure has certainly revealed a fair amount of vulnerability in their cloud offerings. So many services were affected, and I heard some tales of Nest owners who couldn’t unlock their homes or control their HVAC systems because the system couldn’t function without the other side being up and running.

This has always worried me about cloud infrastructure and beyond that, into IoT designs. We have come to depend on much of this kind of technology recently, and it can be tough for those that understand how all this works to let things like HVAC controls and door lock security go off to be managed by a company without any sort of manual override.

Google Chrome and Ads

It isn’t the first time that Google has turned on us, they used to have as a company motto, “Don’t be Evil,” but then when they ran into a profit wall, they realized that they had to accept evil into their company to make more money. So now, Google is Evil. Recently, the details came to light in regards to how Google will be changing Google Chrome. They are going to disable a programming API that enables some ad-blocking software to function correctly. Honestly, I was expecting this sort of thing long ago. It was the perfect reason to look into moving ad-blocking away from the computer level and further into the network itself. At work, I use Cisco Umbrella, and that places a filter on DNS services. When I was playing around with Raspberry Pi computers a long while back, there was another GitHub project that caught my attention, and that was Pi-Hole.

Pi-Hole

The GitHub project, Pi-Hole is a very straightforward installation that provides DNS filtering for malware and adware based on community-developed blocklists. I originally used it on my Raspberry Pi until I discovered that the Pi wasn’t really all that reliable a platform. Since then I have installed Debian Linux on my original Mac Mini, and that machine, which also serves as a central entertainment hub for my household also provides Pi-Hole services. I have set my home router to refer to the Pi-Hole for it’s upstream DNS requests, so every device attached to my home network funnels all the DNS traffic through the Pi-Hole. In that installation, with all the DNS requests sent to the Pi-Hole, it has liberated my Google Chrome, and any other browser, on my computer, iPhone, iPad, or whatever without any settings to change or fuss around with. To that end, thank you, Google, for giving me the push to help eliminate ads throughout my home.

Sirius/XM Outages

In line with what happened when the Google Cloud malfunctioned, there was another event earlier today that posed a challenge for me, IT wise. I was driving into work and I often times listen to XM’s Channel 33, which is First Wave. I was enjoying all of that music, and the announcer mentioned the channel schedule. That reminded me that I have the XM app on my iPhone and I could stream the XM signal into my workplace just as easily as I can stream Spotify music. So then I tried to use the app and ran into Error 1025. What the hell is that? I eventually got into a chat with a Sirius/XM representative, and they told me that there were system level issues at Sirius/XM that was giving everyone challenges. I have to remind myself frequently that my first stop should be DownDetector.com! I browsed to that site while I was on the chat with the XM representative and there it was, Sirius/XM, with a huge complaint spike. I should have started there! Lesson learned!

The way of things, for cloud infrastructure and all these interconnected devices, will not go away anytime soon. While the settings that you have on your phone and computer might also be causing issues with connectivity, it’s important to always keep in mind that sometimes the biggest systems can also be more fragile. It’s important to keep sites like DownDetector in mind because if you are having a problem with a website, chances are so are a whole lot of other people.