The King
Well-Known Member
It's common for shavers to smell the Castle Forbes Cedarwood & Sandalwood cream and to notice the sandalwood scent that they find very disappointing.
So I think it's time to get to know this shaving cream a bit better because in my opinion this soap is often misjudged and by that I mean wrongly negative.
Let's first focus on how the soap name is spelled, first Cedarwood is mentioned and only in the second instance Sandalwood. Building on this, I think we can assume that the main ingredient of this soap is cedarwood, in any case no less than that both types of wood are present 50/50 in the fragrance experience of this shaving soap.
Because in the vernacular almost everyone is talking about the CF sandalwood one expects when opening the jar a smell that goes for example towards the "known" sandalwood scents of a TOBS, DR Harris or Proraso.
And that's where I think there is often the big misunderstanding because the main tone in this soap is cedar wood and that doesn't match the expectation one has and therefore proportionally one often speaks about a disappointing Sandalwood smell.
But if you have ever smelled a real cedarwood shaving soap (such as that of Alphy& Becs) then you recognize the typical "strong smoke scent" that cedarwood has in it.
And in my opinion this Castle Forbes smells more like the beautiful smoky scent of cedarwood which is somewhat "sweet" picked up by the sandalwood and that gives it that typical complex smoky smell.
So in my opinion it would be better to interpret this Castle Forbes with cedar instead of sandalwood because it does more justice to the smell of this beautiful soap.
About the quality of the Castle Forbes creams I think there is already enough written that is fantastic.
The scents of the 4 available creams (1445, Lime, Lavender and the above mentioned C&S wood) are very pure but quite strong and will therefore appeal less to wet shavers who like light scents.
The cream costs for 200 grams around € 30 this is not cheap but on the other hand this cream is very economical in use and therefore the offered price/quality ratio is fine for me.
