Korean Job Discussion Forums

[fromtheuk]

I went to homeplus yesterday and I see they have what I think is called Gillette shaving gel.

Do they sell shaving foam in Korea? I know this is a ridiculous question but I brought quite a bit of shaving foam when I came here.

I'm on my last bottle. I use the foam to shave my head with.

Thank you in advance.

[Juregen]

IF your rob the gel, it becomes foam, don't worry about it

[uberscheisse]

if you're in seoul, you can buy all manner of western toiletries at the namdaemun black market. i'm pretty sure i've seen barbasol there. don't know if you have that in the UK, but it's your pretty classic old-man shaving foam.

though gillette gel is nice. give it a try, rocket yourself into the 1990s. you may never go back.

[reactionary]

i found gilette foam from emart or somewhere. possibly costco, but i hope i didnt pa y their ripoff prices. i prefer foam, too.

[kat2]

LIke the other poster said, when you rub the gel between your hands it becomes foam. Where have you people been?

[oldfatfarang]

What's all this gel/foam stuff? Are you pansies? What's wrong with good old fashioned scented animal fat ? (I think it used to be called soap.)

[pharflung]

I have seen Gillette foam shaving cream for sale at EMarty, I believe, along with a cheaper generic foam. Small cans, big, big price. I didn't buy any.

They also have the gel. I dislike gel. Everytime I have bought I can, I couldn't wait to finish it; sometimes I didn't. It doesn't work as well at lubricating, and all the stuff I tried had a terribly heavy cheap cologne smell. Also, notice the gel expands dramatically when it makes contact with water; the cans in English have a warning about this: if water somehow gets into the can, it will explode, so keep the can away from water.

My apartment came with a partially used can of Foamy. I haven't finished it. Haven't needed to.

My first night in Korea I slept in a motel. There were all sorts of toiletries there, in full size bottles - probably worth in sum the cost of the motel room - some with English on the labels, some without.

There was a tube of what otherwise one would presume to be toothpaste. Except it didn't taste like toothpaste. It tasted like shaving cream. I tried it on my teeth that night, and they certainly were clean, but it was a off putting having my mouth taste of pine needles and menthol.

So the next morning I decided to try this tube as shaving cream. It worked great! The menthol felt like aftershave on my skini. I got a close shave without any nicks. So which was it? It was a mystery. You know the stuff I'm talking about: It has a picture of green pine needles starting to flower on the front of the 160 gm box. It also has bar charts of grey and orange tubes showing things going up and down, with percentages.

The reason I was so suspicious is because I happen to know that back in the States if you look closely in a pharmacy you can find tubes of shaving cream, both brush and brushless. It's great for travelling or camping. They used to be more popular in the old days. Ever see the movie "Peyton Place," the scene where the applicant to be prinicipal stops before entering town to shave, and rubs on some stuff from a tube? The girls must have loved that scene. Great movie.

At any rate, I bought a tube of this stuff and used it to shave, just working it into my wet face to get a lather. Later, I found a shave brush at one of the kwon stores, but it was Chinese crap and the bristles soon started falling out; apparently they don't use very good glue. (I had been wondering what kind of glue might work to secure the bristles better, a glue stick maybe, when my new found stray kitten attacked the brush.) Nevertheless, if you put a squirt of this stuff in a mug and lather it up with a brush, like barbers did in the old days, it makes a first rate shave cream. One tube can last three months.

I was still a bit puzzled. Until I noticed that the Korean teachers at my school love to brush their teeth with this stuff. So I asked politely whether they also shaved with it. They looked at me like I was nuts!

What do Koreans use to shave with? They sure don't seem to sell a lot of the gel. I was afraid to ask. Maybe kimchi?

But I swear, this stuff sure seems to me to be a knock off on some old tube shave cream formula. I can't help wondering whether some Korean found himself in an American hotel room decades ago, and unable to read the labels brushed his teeth with shave cream, liked it, and decided to sell it as toothpaste back home.

[pharflung]

oldfatfarang

[oldfatfarang]

[eamo]

Treat yourself to Prince shaving cream from Lush. Pricey though.