WetShaving

Juneteenth: Day 19 of Lather Games

• Brush: Rubberset 400-3 with a 26 mm unbleached Zenith boar knot at 56 mm loft $Hollow $AtomicAge $DoorKnob
• Razor: Wilkinson Sword – Wilkinson Razor $ADJUSTABLE $EIGHTDAYSAWEEK $FOREVERSAFETY $MACHINEAGE
• Lather: Martin de Candre – Absinthe
• Post Shave: Speick – Men Active
• Fragrance: Spearhead Shaving Company – Seaforth! 3 Scots

Theme justification: It's a hot summer Sunday morning in Commugny, and drops of morning dew glint on the leaves and grapes of the vineyards around the village. The air is still heavy from the thunderstorm that had rolled over Lake Geneva the night before. Vineyard worker Jean Lanfray had slept like shit and wakes up in a mood. He is thirsty. He decides to sneak out before his wife wakes up and starts nagging him about the list of chores to get done before the baby arrives. Jean knows that she hates him, and that the only reason she hasn't divorced him yet is because the priest at Founex had convinced her to stick with him. Down the street, Jean slinks into Gorgette's Buvette and orders a glass of wine, then another. He gets hungry and orders a sandwich with another glass of wine. The thirst doesn't go away and he keeps ordering until he has finished a bottle. His dad shows up and they decide to drink cognac. Six glasses later, Jean feels a bit tired and orders a coffee with brandy and two crèmes de menthe for dessert. By now it's early afternoon, and Jean knows that he better goes home now, so he quickly orders a glass of absinthe to wash it all down. And a second glass, just to make sure. At home, he's a bit tired again, so he tells his wife to make him another coffee with brandy. Scared, she does what he asks. He likes the feeling of power and orders her to polish his shoes, but this time she starts talking back. Going on about divorce again. Jean loses it. The nerve on her. And pregnant with his child, too! He gets his Vetterli rifle from the foot locker and beats her over the head with it. That will teach her, he thinks, but instead she starts screaming for help and runs away, to the back door through the kitchen. He follows her with three long strides, aims and shoots her in the back of her head. Alarmed, his 4 year old daughter Rose comes storming in and he shoots her too. Her little sister Blanche, 18 months old, starts crying in her pram and he shuts her up with a shot in the head. Now he can hear the neighbours yell for the gendarmerie and it dawns on him that this might end poorly for him. He leaves the house and goes to his barn, where he sits down and shoots himself in the face. He misses his brain and only mangles his jaw. He collapses. The gendarmes arrest him minutes later. The trial lasts only one day, and Dr Albert Mahaim, a leading psychologist and expert witness testifies that Lanfray had suffered from a classic case of absinthe madness. Obviously. The public outrage is enormous, and already a few months later, on May 15, 1906, the Canton de Vaud bans the production, sale, possession, and consumption of absinthe. At the federal level, a ballot initiative bans it a few years later in a constitutional amendment, starting the era of moonshine absinthe in the Val de Travers. Think Appalachia, but the bootleggers speak French and make expensive watches in winter.

Fast forward to the late 1990s and a teenage djundjila growing up in a small town in northern Switzerland, looking for ways to rebel with his friends discovers absinthe. The green fairy, de verbotni schnaps.

Nowadays, 20 years after the federal ban had been lifted, the smell of absinthe still reminds me of evenings at the banks of the Aare, drinking moonshine absinthe and feeling grown-up, cool, and free. If you're wondering about the bottle of US moonshine that was smuggles to Switzerland in a nappy bag in the SOTD picture, I added it because it tells me that people feel the same about moonshine everywhere, and that's why they keep making them even after prohibitions end.

Relevant post or frag: Speick has a similar folklore as absinthe, centring around exaggerated properties ascribed to a mountain herb, and 3 Scots makes me think of William Wallace and his fight for freedom (I know that it's the name of a British regiment, the irony isn't lost on me).

Challenge: I first planned to use an open blade razor for this like u/Marquis90 is his legendary lake shave, but TACOed eventually. With a safety razor, it's surprisingly easy to shave without mirror. The only difficulties are feeling the side burns levels and feeling all the missed spots.

The Wilkinson is a fun over-engineered razor that tries to be everything at once: auto-stropping, switchable, but rehonable blades, and adjustable. It's functional, but not a razor I enjoy with its gigantic head that gets in the way.