Skin, without the ten-step routine

What this section covers

Three products. A cleanser, a moisturizer and a sunscreen. That is the entire routine this section recommends, and adding a fourth is something you should do only because you have a specific problem, not because a shelf suggested it.

The reason skin belongs on a shaving site at all is that shaving is a skin treatment. A blade does not only cut hair; it takes the top layer of dead skin with it. That is why a face that has just been shaved is a face with its barrier partly removed, why alcohol stings on it, and why the same product that is unremarkable on an unshaved face is genuinely useful on a shaved one.

The three, and what each is for

Cleanser

Its job is to remove oil and grime without stripping the barrier. Everything else is marketing. The two picks in the face wash roundup are both fragrance-free with fully published ingredient lists, which is the entire basis on which they were chosen. One foams and one barely does; the one that barely foams is the one for a face that is already irritated.

Moisturizer

Its job is to put water back and hold it there. For a shaved face it does a second job: it replaces the post-shave balm, which means one bottle instead of two. See the moisturizer roundup and the head-to-head that explains exactly where the two overlap and where they do not.

Sunscreen

The one most men skip, and the one with the largest effect over a lifetime. Freshly shaved skin is more vulnerable, not less. The sunscreen roundup ranks on published active percentages — an actual disclosed figure, which is rarer than it should be — and on volume, because sunscreen only works in the quantity people actually apply and a small expensive bottle gets rationed.

How to read a label, in two rules

• Ingredients are listed in descending order of quantity down to one per cent, after which the order is the manufacturer's choice. So an active named fourth is present in a meaningful amount, and an active named twenty-eighth is present so it can be named.
• “Fragrance” is a single word covering many compounds. If your skin reacts to things and you do not know what, fragrance-free is the variable worth eliminating first. Every pick in this section that is fragrance-free is marked as such from the published label.

The shaving problems that are really skin problems

Two of the three guides in this section exist because the reader arrives believing they have a razor problem. Razor bumps are ingrown hairs and are a skin and technique issue much more than a blade issue — the guide explains why a closer shave can make them worse rather than better, which is the opposite of what most people assume. And applying sunscreen with a beard is a real practical problem with a straightforward answer that almost nobody writes down.

If your problem is irritation immediately after shaving rather than days later, the answer is more likely in the razor-burn guide or in the electric-shaving version of it.

Which active, and when

The actives questions almost always arrive framed as a choice, and usually are not one. Vitamin C against retinol is the clearest case: they work at opposite ends of the day and the thing you are actually rationing is irritation, which matters more than usual on a face that gets dragged by a blade every morning.