A Shave, Passed Down: Five Fathers Write to Their Sons

Born 1954 · learned at his father's sink

Son,

I want to tell you about a sink. Not this one — the one in the house I grew up in, where my father stood every morning with a brush in his hand and the soap going to lather while the radio played. I was small enough I had to climb on a stool to watch. When he finished he'd hand me the brush and let me paint the last of the foam onto my own smooth face. That was the first thing he ever taught me that I still do today.

By the time I was a young man, the world had decided the ritual was a waste of time. The razor companies sold us cartridges and a can of blue gel and told us faster was better. For thirty years I believed them. I shaved in the shower with three blades and a chemical foam, and my neck paid for it — red, bumpy, burning by Friday. I thought that was just what shaving was.

It isn't. A wet shave is a single keen blade, skin softened with warm water, and a real lather laid down with a brush so every hair stands up to meet the edge. One pass with the grain, maybe a second across it. No tug. No burn. The irritation I lived with for three decades was never my skin's fault — it was the equipment.

The lather is the part I wish I'd come back to sooner. Good shaving soap is made from tallow — rendered beef fat — and the reason that matters is plain biology: tallow's fats are close cousins to the oils your own skin makes, so the lather conditions while it protects. The soap I use now, Eroe, is built on their Siero base — tallow with whole donkey milk, water buffalo milk, and water buffalo milk whey worked in. It's the richest, slickest lather I've ever drawn off a brush, and a single puck lasts the better part of a year.

Eroe means hero in Italian. They made it for fathers. I didn't pick it for the name at first — I picked it because it smells like something a grown man wears and not a candy aisle: Fruity notes, Bergamot, Lavender, Rosemary, Cedarwood, Patchouli, Amber, Tonka bean, Osmanthus, Musk. But the name is why I'm giving you one.

Here is the old way, the way my father showed me. Soak the brush. Build the lather in a bowl or right on your face, thirty seconds, until it's glossy. Map your grain — everyone's neck grows in its own directions; learn yours. Short strokes, no pressure; let the blade's weight do the work. Rinse cold. Then a few drops of balm to settle the skin.

I am an ordinary man. I was never anybody's hero but yours, and only because you were small and didn't know better yet. But standing you on a stool the way my father stood me — handing you the brush — that is the closest thing to immortality a regular man gets. Do it slow. Do it with your own boy someday.

— Dad

Born 1967 · the drugstore-cartridge years

Son,

Nobody taught me to shave. That's the honest version. Your grandfather worked late, I had a key around my neck, and one morning in high school there was stubble, so I figured it out from a magazine ad — twin blades, a can of foam, go fast, don't think. That was the whole instruction manual for my generation: convenience as a personality.

It took me until middle age to realize I'd been sold a subscription to my own irritation. Every few years a new cartridge with one more blade, a little more plastic, a little more money, the same razor burn. So I did the most Gen X thing possible: I got suspicious, and I went backward to something that actually worked.

A double-edge safety razor takes one cheap blade — pennies, not ten dollars a cartridge — and it gives a closer, calmer shave than anything I used for twenty-five years. There's a short learning curve. I won't lie to you about that; the first week you'll go slow and pay attention, which is exactly the point. After that it's muscle memory, and your skin stops fighting you.

The other thing I had wrong was the foam. That blue stuff strips your face. Real shaving soap made from tallow does the opposite — it's built from fats that match your skin's own, so it cushions the blade and leaves the skin conditioned instead of squeaky and raw. I use Eroe, on their tallow-and-milk Siero base. It smells like an actual man made a decision: Fruity notes, Bergamot, Lavender, Rosemary, Cedarwood, Patchouli, Amber, Tonka bean, Osmanthus, Musk.

I didn't get this handed down. There was no stool, no brush, no father at the sink. So I'm doing the thing I didn't get — standing here with you, showing you the grain map of your own face, telling you to ease up on the pressure. Building the ritual from scratch, late, on purpose.

Eroe means hero. I'm not one, and I'm allergic to the word besides. But I figured out late that you don't inherit this stuff automatically — somebody has to choose to pass it on. So consider it chosen. Slow down. The five minutes is the gift.

— Dad

Born 1979 · grew up analog, shaved digital

Son,

I'm a bridge. I grew up analog — bikes till the streetlights, a phone bolted to the kitchen wall — and I grew up into a world that turned digital under my feet. I learned to shave on cartridges like everyone my age, and then, in my twenties, I found wet shaving the way my generation found everything for a minute there: on a forum, at 1 a.m., reading strangers argue about blade angles like it was scripture.

That's where I learned what nobody at a store would tell you: the old way is better, and it was never actually gone. A brush, a tallow soap, a single blade, warm water, three minutes of your full attention. I went down the rabbit hole and never climbed back out, and my skin has thanked me every morning since.

Here's what sold me, and it's the thing I most want you to keep. The shave became the one part of my day that wasn't on a screen. No notifications, no scroll, no half-watching something. Just hot water, the smell of the lather, the sound of the blade. In a life that gets more frictionless and more frictionless until nothing means anything, a little friction on purpose is how you stay a person.

That's the part I most want to teach you, and it has nothing to do with whiskers. Not because the screen is the enemy — I make my living on it, and you probably will too — but because a man needs at least one thing a day that asks for his hands and his patience and gives nothing back but the doing of it. The razor is mine. The weight of it, the drag of the blade, the smell of the lather filling a small bathroom, the few minutes that belong to no app and no one but me: that ritual has kept me steadier than I know how to explain to you yet. One day it might do the same for you.

The kit is simple. Lather from tallow soap — fats that condition your skin instead of stripping it. I use Eroe on the Siero base (tallow, donkey milk, buffalo milk and whey), and I run the matching toner and balm after to settle everything down. The scent is grown-up, not loud: Fruity notes, Bergamot, Lavender, Rosemary, Cedarwood, Patchouli, Amber, Tonka bean, Osmanthus, Musk.

Eroe is Italian for hero, and they built it as a father's scent. I like that it's a little sentimental, because I am, even if I cover it with jokes. I came up in the last generation that remembers the world before it sped up. This — the brush, the blade, the three slow minutes — is me handing you a piece of that on purpose, before it's only a thing your dad used to do.

— Dad

Born 1988 · rediscovered the razor online

Son,

My generation got sold razors by subscription — a box on the doorstep every month, a clever ad, a logo that wanted to be your friend. I bought it for years. Then I started reading the things I put on my body, the way I'd started reading labels on everything else, and the wet-shaving world online pulled me out of the cartridge for good.

What I want you to understand is that the choice is mostly about what's in the can versus what's in the puck. Drugstore foam is a list of chemicals built to be cheap and shelf-stable. A real tallow soap is built to be good for skin: rendered fat whose fatty-acid profile is close to your own sebum, so the lather conditions the skin while it protects it from the blade. I can read you the whole label on the one I use and not flinch — tallow, donkey milk, water buffalo milk and whey, shea, kokum and cocoa butter, a little hops and lanolin. That's Eroe, on their Siero base.

The shave itself is cheaper and better than the subscription ever was. A single blade costs pennies, gives a closer result, and throws off almost no waste — no plastic cartridge in a landfill every week. After, I use an unscented grass-fed tallow cream as a daily moisturizer, because the same logic that makes tallow good in the lather makes it good on the skin the rest of the day. (Fair warning: it takes a few minutes more than a shower-shave. That's not a bug. That's the whole thing.)

I'm trying to be an intentional father — to choose things on purpose instead of having them chosen for me by whoever bought the ad. This is one of those choices. It's small. A blade, a brush, a soap that smells like a person and not a product: Fruity notes, Bergamot, Lavender, Rosemary, Cedarwood, Patchouli, Amber, Tonka bean, Osmanthus, Musk.

Eroe means hero, and the makers built it for dads — for the ordinary men who become heroes to one small person through nothing but showing up. That's the only kind I've got a shot at being. So I'm showing up at the sink, with you, slow, on purpose.

— Dad

Born 1997 · for a son who'll shave one day

Son,

You're asleep down the hall as I write this, fists up by your ears the way you always sleep, and your face is about as far from needing a razor as a face can be. You won't read this for years. But I wanted to put it down now, while you're small, so that one day — when there's stubble where there's only softness tonight — you'll know it was waiting for you.

I'm probably the youngest dad who'll ever hand his boy a letter like this, and I came up the furthest from the old way. My first razor showed up in a subscription box. I learned everything from short videos. Fast was the only speed I knew. And somewhere in all that speed I started craving the opposite — things that are real, that last, that I chose on purpose instead of being served by an algorithm.

That's how I found the wet shave, years before you came along. Not from a father at a sink — from people online who'd quietly decided the slower, older version of a thing is usually the better one. A single blade. A brush. A bar of soap that lasts most of a year instead of plastic cartridges in the trash every week. For a generation that's watched the planet pay for convenience, that math means something. I hope it still does when it's your turn.

By the time you need it, here's what I'll teach you. One sharp blade with the grain, warm water first, a real lather worked up with a brush — closer than any five-blade thing, and none of the burn. The lather is tallow, which will sound old-fashioned to you the way it once did to me, until you understand it: animal fat whose oils are close to your own skin, so it conditions instead of stripping. The soap I'll start you on is Eroe, on their tallow-and-milk Siero base. It smells like something a man chooses, not something he's sold: Fruity notes, Bergamot, Lavender, Rosemary, Cedarwood, Patchouli, Amber, Tonka bean, Osmanthus, Musk.

I like that it's made the slow way, in small batches, by people whose names you could find. In a throwaway world I want to hand you things that were built to last and made on purpose. A good razor will outlive me. A puck of soap outlasts a season. The habit — if I do this right — outlasts us both.

Eroe is Italian for hero, and the people who make it made it for fathers. I'm brand new at this, and by the time you can read this I'll have gotten a thousand things wrong — sorry in advance for most of them. But I figured one thing out early, holding you at three in the morning: the slow thing, chosen on purpose, with your kid beside you, is the whole point.

So this puck is going to sit in the cabinet a long time. Years. And then one morning you'll be tall enough to meet your own eyes in that mirror, and I'll soak the brush, and stand you close, and show you — the way I wish someone had shown me, the way I've been quietly practicing for since before you could hold up your own head. I can't wait to teach you something you don't need yet. Stand close, when you're ready. I'll be right here.

— Dad