İ think some of you guys being too harsh on Arko. Yes it may dry ur skin a bit after the shave but who cares when u have all those aftershave products. Arko lathers like hell and provides good cushion for the blade also slickness there too. what else you want from a soap it cost £1.50 including postage.
You know what else provides me the same performance? Any kind of soap. Not shaving soap. A random bar of hand soap will be slick enough so I can shave with. It might not have enough cushion, but it will be slick enough.
But why would I want to use that, when I have so many other options available? I don't see too many people shaving with hand soap, even if it offers great value. You can probably get one for £0,5.
If it's something that I've learned after trying Williams, is that you can pack any kind of soap as "shaving soap", as long as you sell it cheap, people will eat it up.
Arko is one step up towards shaving soaps when compared with Williams. It does lather better. But that's about all there is to it. Not great performance, not too good of a scent, it's just soap. Pay a bit extra, you can get an excellent soap. We're talking about pennies per shave, not such a big price difference.
As I like to joke about some people obsession with cheap stuff, if I truly feel the need to save £0,1/day with shaving, maybe I should stop shaving, as there might be things that I need more, like food.
With a few exceptions, shaving soap is cheap. No matter if we're talking about Arko or Saponificio Varesino, the price per shave on the long run will be small, almost negligible. A Saponificio Varesino is £15, but you can probably get 6 months of daily shaves from it. We're talking about £0,1/day worth of shaving soap. With Arko, that value might go down a bit, something like £0,08 probably.
I'm usually cost-efficient, but when we're talking pennies, I rarely see the point. £0,02 it's the price of few crumbs of bread. Getting a top performing soap it's not a budget breaker. It might seem a lot when compared with a puck of Arko, but it's advisable to take into consideration price per shave, and not the price of the whole puck. Arko sticks are weighted at 75 grams, and they are more on the soft side. For a triple milled soap, you get more efficiency for the same quantity.
Being this economical might make sense if you are running a business. If you have a barbershop, saving those pennies each shave will translate into higher profit margin. But as a hobby, I don't really see the point.