The best shaving cream for sensitive skin

The word on the front is not the specification

"Sensitive" is not a regulated term. No test has to be passed, no ingredient has to be absent, and no percentage has to be met. It means what the brand decides it means, which is usually "gentler than the other one we make".

The back of the tube is different. An ingredient list is ordered by concentration down to 1 per cent, and in the EU and increasingly elsewhere a set of fragrance components has to be declared by name rather than hidden inside the word "parfum". That list is the only specification this category actually publishes, so it is what this page ranks on.

What this page ranks on

1. Is the full ingredient list published? If not, the product cannot be ranked here at all, whatever it says on the front.
2. Fragrance, including essential oils. The single most common cause of a reaction to a product sold as gentle. "Naturally derived" fragrance is still fragrance.
3. Menthol and eucalyptus. They feel like relief and they are counter- irritants - they work by producing a competing sensation, not by calming anything.
4. Botanical extracts. The one almost nobody excludes, and a frequent culprit. Oat and green tea are botanicals, however soothing the marketing.
5. Alcohol. Less common in creams than in aftershaves, and still worth checking.

What each one publishes

The pick: Vanicream Shave Cream

Vanicream publishes the whole list and it is short. More usefully, it publishes the exclusions explicitly: free of fragrance, dye, parabens, formaldehyde, lanolin and alcohol - and free of botanical extracts and essential oils.

That last exclusion is the one that earns it the top spot. Botanicals are the standard way a "gentle" product gets its marketing story, and they are a common irritant for the exact skin the product is aimed at. Excluding fragrance is table stakes for this category; excluding botanicals as well is rare enough that it is effectively the differentiator.

Underneath the exclusions it is a real product rather than an absence of one - glycerin and panthenol sit high on the list, doing the slip and the soothing respectively.

The honest cons. There is genuinely no scent, and for some people the smell is half of why they took up wet shaving. It is a tube cream, so it does not whip into a bowl lather the way a puck does - if the ritual is the point, this is not the product for it. And it costs more per ounce than a can of supermarket foam, which is the comparison most people are actually making.

The traditional one: Proraso Sensitive

A hundred and fifty milliliters of soft Italian cream that lathers with a brush like a soap rather than squeezing out like a gel. Proraso publishes the full list, states that 90 per cent of ingredients are of natural origin, and publishes real exclusions: no parabens, phthalates, silicones, mineral oils, artificial colors or SLS.

On the list itself, oat kernel extract and green tea leaf extract both appear by name rather than only on the front of the tube, which is more than most "with oatmeal" products can say.

The honest cons, and they are the reason it is second rather than first. Parfum is on the list, followed by six separately declared fragrance allergens. The word "sensitive" here means gentler than Proraso's own menthol-and-eucalyptus green formula - which it certainly is - rather than fragrance-free. And oat and green tea are botanical extracts, which is the category this page treats with most suspicion. If your skin is reactive, this is a fine buy. If it is genuinely allergic, the list tells you why it might not be.

If you want the ritual: Taylor of Old Bond Street

A hundred and fifty grams of soft English cream in a tub, with a genuinely unscented organic variant whose published list runs to jojoba oil, aloe and vitamin E. It whips into a bowl lather faster and more forgivingly than any hard puck, which makes it the compromise pick: the traditional experience, without the fragrance load, provided you buy the unscented version specifically.

The honest cons. The scented range - which is most of the range - is heavily fragranced, so you have to buy the right variant deliberately. It contains botanicals, so it does not clear the bar Vanicream does. And a cream uses more product per shave than a hard soap, so the tub does not last as long as its weight suggests.

The things that beat the cream

Worth saying plainly on a page like this: for most people the cream is not the cause. It is third or fourth on the list of what actually irritates skin during a shave.

• A dull blade. Dragging rather than cutting, which tears the top of the skin. Change it more often than feels necessary.
• Too many passes. Every pass over the same skin is another abrasion. Two, with the grain then across it - never three.
• Pressure. A safety razor cuts under its own weight. Pressing is the single most common habit carried over from cartridges.
• Alcohol afterwards. Splashing an alcohol aftershave on skin that has just had its top layer removed undoes whatever the cream did - a balm is the answer.

Fix those four and the cream matters less than this page implies. The full ranking of causes is here, and a milder razor is usually a bigger lever than a different tube.