This is going to be a unsettling post. It is not aimed at Dennis, although his post convinced me I had to write this one. I would like to point out up front, that I don't own this forum, and even less so the minds of the people who are posting here.
But I did found it, and I can only testify about my mindset at that time. I envisioned the average straight razor user, as I know him. That might not be the same guy most of you know from the various forums. Of the 15 to 20 straight shavers that have been seated at my kitchen table for getting a primer at razor sharpening, only one really stuck around to post on the shaving forums. That's our very own Decraew. (I've met other of our members as well, but neither of them sat on my kitchen table, except Gary, but that's a different story) There are about 5 others with whom I meet a couple of times a year, when we organize a straight razor shavers meeting at one of our homes. The rest of the people that passed here, are only very rarely in touch, or not at all. But while all these fellows shave with a straight razor, they are not daily, or even weekly, occupied with it. It's not a hobby. It's just something they do. Something like heating the living room with a woodstove. Part of a certain philosophy, fun, cosy and pleasant, but not a passionate hobby.
Nonetheless, all these men have been, at a given point, in search of information to get their razor(s) sharpened. Some of them ended up at my kitchen table, because they were friends of friends of guys that were here before. Others contacted me through wathever forum I was active at the time. Yes, they visited forums, but only to find answers for their questions, not to stick around.
These were the guys I had in mind, when I registered the domain Coticule.be. They are people with a feel for tradition and an artisan inclination. People who may appreciate the rich heritage of these ancient rocks that got under my skin so much.
The forum on which I've held a membership during the first years of this hobby was vastly ruled by passionate shaving nerds, as my wife call them. And she counts me among that group. I have absolutely nothing against being such a passionate shaving nerd, although it often feels just too trivial an activity for devoting that much time at it. Maybe that's why I love Coticules so much. Because it lends my otherwise trivial hobby a connection with historical importance. A legacy, if you wish. That sounds better already, don't you agree? But at least, I justify my hobby with someting that connects to reality. A small part of Belgium indeed has been extensively mined, thousands of people have earned a living in its industry, some even died because of it. And the wethstones have been (and are) exported world wide.
On the obove mentioned forum, I witnessed other people applying a different strategy for finding justification of owning a drawer full of hones. They fantasized about the differences and cultivated a very nasty sort of gear fetishism. That's easy to do, because no 2 shaves are entirely the same, and it's amazingly easy to attribute those differences to whatever piece of equipment you wish to focus on, whether that's a new soap, that brush you saved for so long, the latest addition to your hones' collection, the latest hyped paste on your strop. It amazes me how people, of whom many had formal training in fields of science or engineering, were so readily prepared to jettison all principles of objectivity, for the sake of justifying purchases, or for the sake of justifying the time spent with a somewhat insignificant hobby. Not that I really care. If a bunch of guys wants to get together in some collective form of self-delusion, that's all fine with me. But that is not the kind of game I play, and I don't think it is of any help for the group of people I had in mind to serve, upon founding Coticule.be
Does that mean I think there are no finishing differences among Coticules? No, it just means that I don't know. And that no one is going to be able to discern those differences - if thet exist at all - in any meaningful way, by making a couple highly contaminated observations during his daily shaves.
If you want to investigate the differences between, let's say, a specimen of the La Petite Blanche layer and a specimen of La Verte, then get you ass over in the Research section, where we'll do our very best to setup a survey, that deals with isolating the properties of the whetstones, determining the optimum procedure for each of them, and run an unbiased (blind) comparison of the shave performance. Determining the optimal procedure alone, will turn out next to be impossible.
Sure, we can do as did one particular member of that forum. He insisted on using totally invariable routines for all Coticules he owned. Obviously, his routines worked better for some of his stones than others. It led him to believe that only a limited number of Coticules are suited for razor honing. And to this day, he defends that belief with passion. But if we agree we're going to use the optimum approach for each Coticule we test, is it also going to be the optimum way for each and every razor honed with these Coticules? And will that "best possible" edge of the given hones, be the best possible edge for my skin or for someone elses? If one understands the relevance of both these questions, then one understands how utterly impossible it is to rank hones - and Coticules in particular- in some kind of Hit Parade of Smoothness & Performance.
At best one can say: "I haven't fully figured out how to get the best of my hones and razors", because that takes knowledge of the hones and of the razors in one's collection. I have no doubt that all of us would experience even better shaves, if we confined ourselves to only 2 razors and 1 Coticule, though it would be less fun. That is the message I want to bring to the unsuspecting new straight razor users who discover this website and it's forum.
Those of you who like to roam into the finer aspects of your highly indiviudal journey with the whetstones you're painstakingly seek to master, would better learn to express yourself with utmost nuance, as to not incidentally trick the unsuspecting shaver into buying more than one Coticule. Or else we'll have to make a confined "Coticule Nerds" section, and start assignig badges. Or you could get a membership of the aformentioned forum. Contact me if you need the URL.
Please understand that the day I'll stop speaking my mind, I'll be gone.
With respect and warmest regards,
Bart.