It’s either incredibly obvious or incredibly brilliant: shave before taking a shower. Then you can wash away whatever shaving cream remains when you shampoo your beard.
The standard advice for shaving one’s face is to do so after taking a shower to soften the whiskers. But I’ve never been convinced that shower-first results in any appreciable softening. And shave-first beats using a comb and running water after showering to remove shaving cream from the line where the beard ends and the bare skin of the neck begins.
To the bearded: is this suggestion as obvious as I fear it is, or as brilliant as I hope it is?
*
February 15: An assiduous reader alerted me to an August 1986 AP article, “Half of men shave after showering”:
[The Deseret News, August 22, 1986.]
Thanks, Brian.
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Friday, February 13, 2026
A life hack for the bearded
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comments: 6
I use the shave-first approach.
Brilliant, that’s us :)
I'm definitely a shave-after-shower guy.
I shave during the shower with a fog-proof mirror affixed to the tiles. I use a shower head with a low-Flo setting so that I don’t waste water while shaving and so there are no “suspicious things in the sink” as Liz Phair has it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHRvYsXvS8M&list=RDxHRvYsXvS8M&start_radio=1
Another trick is not to shave immediately after the shaving cream goes on, but to give it time to work. Someone did a study that showed folks were shaving too immediately, while also doing the hardest part first. Better to let the formula do its magic.
Thanks, everyone, for the comments.
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