Hot Towel Shave: What It Is, What It Costs

A hot towel shave is a straight razor shave with hot, damp towels laid on your face before the blade and again after it. It takes about twenty minutes. The towels are not theatre. Heat and water soften the beard and settle the skin underneath it, so the razor takes the hair off in one or two passes instead of four, and that is the whole reason your face feels different for the next two days. On our menu it is the Clean Shave, £11.

What happens in the chair during a hot towel shave

Most men have only seen this in a film, so here is the actual order of it.

You go back in the chair first. The beard gets washed, or at least wiped down properly, because a towel works better on clean skin and a day on the Harrow Road sits on a face more than you would think. Then the first towel goes on, hot and wrung out, over everything except your nose. It stays there two or three minutes. That is the bit everyone remembers, partly because it is genuinely pleasant and partly because you cannot see anything and there is nothing you can do about anything for a moment.

Towel off, pre shave oil on, then lather, worked into the beard with a brush rather than dropped on top of it. The brush is doing more than the lather is. It lifts the hair up off the face so the blade has something to catch, and a palmful of foam pressed flat does the opposite.

Then the shave. Two passes for most men: with the grain first, down the cheeks and the jaw, re-lathered, then across the grain to take up what the first pass left. Against the grain only if your skin has already proved it can take it, and never on a first visit, because nobody in the room yet knows how your neck grows. Necks grow in swirls and they are where the trouble is.

A second towel at the end, cooler than the first, takes off the last of the lather and settles everything down. Then balm, and no splash aftershave unless you specifically ask, for reasons we went through at length in what actually stops razor burn.

What the hot towels are actually doing

Two things. And one thing they are not doing, which is worth saying because the back of every face wash in Boots says otherwise.

The first is the hair. A dry beard hair is tough, which is the whole reason shaving is a job at all. Sit that hair under a hot, damp towel for three minutes and it swells with water and softens, and then it cuts with far less force behind the blade. Less force means less drag, and drag is what leaves a neck red at eleven in the morning.

The second is the skin. Warm skin is more pliable and sits flatter over the jaw, so the blade rides across it instead of catching on it. It also means we can find the shape of your face properly, which matters more on a man with a sharp jaw or a scar he has stopped noticing.

What the towel is not doing is opening your pores. Pores are not doors. There is no muscle in there to open and shut them, whatever the packaging says. Warm damp skin behaves differently from cold dry skin and that difference is worth having, but no door is opening and nothing is being flushed out of anything.

A Clean Shave and a Hot Towel Finish are not the same booking

We have two things on the menu with hot towels in them, and this catches people out.

Clean Shave, £11, twenty minutes. This is the hot towel shave. The beard comes right off with a straight edge, towels either side of the blade. If that is what you searched for, this is the booking you want.

Hot Towel Finish, £10, fifteen minutes. This is a treatment, not a shave. Steamed towels and balm at the end of a haircut, and no blade goes anywhere near your beard. It is offered as an add-on at the end of a booking rather than taken on its own, and plenty of men remember it longer than they remember the haircut.

The pound between them is not the difference. One removes a beard, the other finishes a cut. Turn up wanting a bare face with a Hot Towel Finish booked and you get fifteen very pleasant minutes and your beard is still there.

If you want the cut and the shave in the same visit, that is £15 for the haircut and £11 for the shave, so £26 and just under an hour of chair time. There is no package price on that pair and there should not be: it is two jobs and it bills as two jobs. The menu has the times against every service, which is two minutes well spent before you book anything.

Who we would talk out of one

Four cases, and we would rather say them now than in the chair.

You have never had a straight edge and something is happening in three days. A wedding, a flight, a first day somewhere. Some men get an hour or two of warmth under the jaw afterwards, some get nothing at all, and you do not yet know which one you are. Have your first one on an ordinary Tuesday and find out with nothing riding on it.

Your beard hair is tightly curled and you get ingrown hairs. A straight razor cuts close, and close is exactly what feeds an ingrown on curly hair. A shorter beard with the lines razored in usually gets you the sharp look you are after without the week that follows.

There is something active on the skin you want shaved. Acne that is sore right now, a cold sore, eczema in flare. We will work around it or ask you to come back in a fortnight. That is not a judgement on your skin, it is that a blade over an inflamed patch goes badly for everyone involved.

You actually like the beard. Every September a few men decide summer is over and the beard should go with it. Two numbers to have in your head first. It is roughly a month before there is a shape worth cutting again and eight weeks before it is genuinely full, and the second and third week of growing it back are the ones that make men give up. Give that a week of thinking rather than one cold Saturday.

Getting the most out of the twenty minutes

Book it rather than chancing a walk-in. You will probably still get a chair if you do, but a shave is the one service where being squeezed in costs you the thing you came for. The towels need their three minutes and the lather needs working in, and a barber with someone waiting will shorten both without meaning to. Put twenty minutes in the book and the twenty minutes are yours.

Say it is your first one before anybody picks anything up. It changes how the man on your chair works: lighter on the first pass, with the grain only, and a proper look at how your neck grows before he commits to a direction on it. Nobody minds being told, and you get a better shave for saying it.

Then buy a balm before you come in, alcohol free and unfragranced, and put it on that evening. The shave buys you a face that feels like that for about two days. What you do with it on the first night decides whether you get the second one.