Taylor of Old Bond Street’s sandalwood cream is one of the standard answers to the beginner’s question of what to buy first. It is a 150 g (5.3 oz) tub of soft cream with a strong sandalwood scent, and it whips into a thick lather with a brush in less time than a hard soap takes. If you already lather with a brush and you like woody, old-fashioned scents, it is an easy thing to buy.
If you shave in the shower with your hands and a cartridge razor, or your skin reacts to fragrance, it is the wrong product, and no amount of technique will change that. This review covers the 150 g bowl sold on Amazon and by the specialist shaving retailers, the scent, the routine it asks for, and the smaller sizes in the same range.
What is actually in the tub
The product is a single tub of cream: no brush, no bowl, no razor. What arrives is a round tub with a screw lid and 150 g of soft cream in it, and the lid carries the details that matter here — the size, the address, the founding year 1854 and the words made in England.
It is a cream by name and a soap by chemistry. The published ingredient list opens with water, stearic acid and myristic acid, neutralised with potassium and sodium hydroxide, plus glycerin and fragrance.
That is the make-up of a soft shaving soap rather than a detergent gel, and it explains the two things people notice about this product. A small amount whips up into a dense, wet lather, because the fatty acids that become lather are already in the tub. And the tub lasts, because you load a damp brush with a fingertip of cream instead of pumping out a ribbon of gel. The lather is dense and slippery rather than airy, which is what a fatty-acid base is for; it does not rescue a dull blade, but it is what lets a sharp one glide.
The maker’s own description is short: a luxurious and masculine sandalwood fragrance, and a lather it calls uniquely smooth and creamy. The cream is made in England, and Taylor of Old Bond Street still sells it from its own shop at 74 Jermyn Street in St James’s, London.
The scent is the decision
Sandalwood here is not a background note. It is warm, dry and woody, and it is the dominant impression of the product rather than something you have to go looking for. That is either the reason you are reading this page or the reason to close it. It is worth being concrete about what the fragrance carries, because the label is unusually frank about it.
The declared fragrance allergens on the ingredient list include linalool, geraniol, benzyl salicylate, citronellol, eugenol, benzyl benzoate, benzyl cinnamate, limonene and coumarin, alongside extracts of two tree mosses, Evernia furfuracea and Evernia prunastri. The preservative pair methylchloroisothiazolinone and methylisothiazolinone is on the list too.
None of that makes the cream unsafe. It is a rinse-off product, and every one of those ingredients is permitted in a rinse-off product.
But it does mean this is emphatically not the fragrance-free option. If scented products have stung your face before, or your skin is reacting to something right now, this is not the cream to experiment with. Buy it because you want to smell of sandalwood, not in spite of it.
It needs a brush, and the bowl is just the tub
You can smear this on by hand and shave. You will use more cream than you need and get a thin layer instead of the cushion the product is known for. It is built to be loaded onto a brush and worked up with water, either straight onto your face or in a separate bowl.
The sequence matters more than the tools. Soak the brush, shake most of the water out, pick up a small amount of cream, then add water a few drops at a time until the lather turns glossy and holds its shape. The four moves are the same ones our guide to lathering shaving soap sets out, and the water side of it is where most thin lather comes from.
“Bowl” in the product name means the plastic tub the cream ships in, not a vessel for making lather. If you want a proper lather bowl, that is a separate purchase, and the difference between a cereal bowl and a ridged shaving bowl is not imaginary. The shaving bowls worth buying cover which shapes do the job.
The brush is the one piece of kit you cannot work around. A cheap boar or synthetic brush is enough; the gap between an inexpensive brush and an expensive one is smaller here than the gap between using a brush and not using one. If you are starting from nothing, the brush picks for beginners are the ones worth looking at first.
Which of the four sizes to buy
The same cream is sold in four pack sizes, and the choice is about how sure you are of the scent rather than about performance:
- 150 g bowl. The size linked above, and the one the specialist retailers carry. At the maker’s own list prices it is the cheaper of the two bowls per gram.
- 75 ml bowl. The same cream in a smaller tub, for trying the scent without committing to a large one.
- 75 ml and 50 ml tubes. Narrower opening, easier to squeeze, sized for a washbag rather than a shelf.
If you have never used it, a small bowl or a 50 ml tube is the cheaper way to find out whether you want sandalwood on your face every morning. If you already know you like the scent, buy the 150 g bowl: same cream, better value per shave, and one purchase instead of two.
Who should skip it
- You shave without a brush and have no intention of starting. A tube cream or a gel suits that routine better and wastes less.
- Fragrance irritates your skin, or you are reacting to something at the moment.
- You dislike sandalwood, or you want to smell of nothing in particular.
- You want the cheapest possible lather. A hard soap or a supermarket cream costs less per shave and lathers perfectly well.
- You are buying it for someone else and do not know whether they like scented products.
How it compares with cheaper creams and soaps
This is a mid-priced cream, not a cheap one. The useful comparison is not whether it is the best cream made, but whether you want this scent badly enough to pay more than a supermarket cream costs. What you get for the difference is the fragrance and the density the cream reaches with a brush. What you do not get is a closer shave, because the blade and your angle decide that.
If you are still choosing a format, the shaving cream guide compares creams, gels and foams by the routine each one suits, and the shaving soap roundup is where this cream sits against the hard soaps it gets compared with most often.
Before you buy
Buy the 150 g bowl if you lather with a brush and want a warm woody scent rather than a neutral one. Buy a smaller size first if the scent is an unknown. Skip it if fragrance has bothered your skin before — the declared allergen list is long, and that is the product telling you what it is, not a flaw you can learn to work around.
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