Review (5/5): Good basic shaving soap, lightly scented.
I've only tried a few different shaving soaps in my time wet shaving. TOBS (Taylor of Old Bond Street) Sandalwood has been my go-to for a few years now. My only nitpick is the fragrance...which is an oddly clean and powdery sandalwood that projects across my entire bathroom. The fragrance also has some decent longevity, and I can still pick up notes of it while I'm getting dressed and putting on cologne, which it sometimes clashes with. I guess my takeaway is that I needed a change from that scent. Mitchell's Wool Fat soap seemed like a good alternative, and from what I could tell from skimming forums and reviews, it doesn't smell nearly as strongly as TOBS.
I'm pleasantly surprised so far. It lathered in my hard water relatively well. Just bloomed it in hot water for a minute beforehand and went to work on it with a medium body boarhair brush. The soap had a slicker feel than I'm used to and the lather had slightly less structural integrity than TOBS but my shave didn't seem to suffer for it. Like I usually do, I used the remaining lather I'd made to wash the rest of my face, which worked like a charm. The post shave was just okay. I honestly felt like I'd done a worse job on my neck than I actually had. Might have been the switch to a tallow soap, might have been the lanolin but my neck skin felt a little roughed up and gummed up, even after my post-shave alum block and witch hazel. As my skin dried and everything calmed down, I could finally tell that I'd actually gotten an extremely close shave and had miraculously avoided any damage in the usual spots around my adams apple. Good stuff.
The fragrance is also a nice surprise. The Kent company, which markets and sells a repackaged version of this same soap in India claimed it had elements of Pine, Patchouli, Lavender, Musk, Cloves, Nutmeg, Cedar, Sandalwood. I now see what the folks on the forums meant when they called that BS.
It does have a clean lavender note up front, a bit of soft powdery musk in the middle and a nebulous slightly woodsy note hanging out somewhere in the background. All the other notes they claimed are MIA though. This is a very subdued version of a classic old-school barbershop scent. No long distance projection, no longevity past the end of the shave.
Actually, now that I smell my hands hours later, I can actually detect a bit of that musky woodsy accord hanging around. After it managed to trigger a sense memory of helping my aunt shear sheep as a kid, I now realize that I'm actually smelling raw lanolin. So I guess with that in mind, I'd have to reframe this soap as mostly smelling like lavender and lanolin.
Which I could definitely get used to.