Thread: Cyril R Salter "Lime" shaving cream

Hello, and welcome to part 1 of our new daily soap Robin's Great Lime Shoot-Out. The Salter sample was kindly provided by the good people at The Different Scent in Berlin.

Right. Why a lime shoot-out? Because lime scented creams are rather popular in this forum; there are a lot of lime scented creams out there, including those by popular manufacturers; and because I like lime, too.

The benchmark product will be Castle Forbes "Lime" shaving cream, because most of us, including our fearless leaders, agree that CF Lime is to shaving creams what the Chronik is to razors. Only, it really works better than anything else. So without further ado, let's see what Cyril Salter has to offer.

Packaging: Salters products come in blue tubs with white lettering. The lid is very light, and does not open as easily as it should. But it is airtight. The plastic feels thin, and tacky, overall. I can already assure you that this tub will have the lowest scores of all creams tested.

Texture: Whipped cream, fluffy and nice. Light greenish yellow colour.

Scent: Nothing to write home about, was my first impression. Very light, with traces of something sweet, on which I could not put my finger at first. A look at the ingredients confirmed my suspicion, though: orange oil. Sorry, but I have always felt that lime and orange mix badly.

But that was just the beginning. When whipped into a lather, the scent is very, very powerful. Unlike CF Lime, which has a heavy scent in the tub, but a light and pleasant one on the face, Salter's cream explodes into a strong lime-ish scent. I cannot say I liked that much, and I would have given this cream an even lower overall score if we had not decided to not rate scent, because olfactory properties are always rather subjective.

Latherability: Not too shoddy, really. The texture of the lather can be nicely controlled with drops of water, and since the lather hardly dries out at all, you can play with anything from microporous foam to creamy cream. Or something. Any road, you get lots of lather from a little cream.

Cushion: Not enough. It could be worse, but it should be a lot better. Adding liberal amounts of AOS pre shave helped, but I prefer to not use this pre shave, because it is hard to remove from both razor, and brush.

Moisturising: This is where this cream really fails. The lather is very slick, and harder to remove from the face than it should be, but the cream moisturises badly. A combination of AOS pre shave, and CF after shave, helped. But on its own, this cream fails in this category.

Price: Quite excellent: £10.00 for 165ml, which makes it the cheapest of the creams tested.

Overall impression: As was to be expected, Castle Forbes "Lime" wins by leaps and bounds.

I was given a sample of this, so shan't comment on the packaging or price.

Texture
Very thick. It probably works very well if you like to get the brush into the tub, however, i used an almond sized amount in my bowl & it was a little too thick for me.

Scent
Opening my little tub, i could barely smell anything. Oh well. Some creams are like that & only really give off a scent when you start working up a lather. Not this one though! There's nothing unpleasant, it just doesn't smell of a lot.

Latherability
As mentioned, i thought it was a bit too thick. It took some work to get the cream to break up. Once it did the lather was nice & thick & there was plenty of it too.

Cushion
It's ok. It lacks the slickness & glide i like, but the razor didn't skip at all & no alum sting.

Moisturising
This aspect wasn't great. When i washed off the last of the lather it felt very good, but very quickly my skin tightened up & felt a little uncomfortable.

Overall impression
It's decent enough, but i'm not going to be buying a mediocre cream.