Should You Exfoliate Before or After Shaving?
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Short answer: before.
I had this backwards for a long time, so I want to explain why the order actually matters. It makes more difference than switching products does.
What I had backwards
For the longest time I thought a scrub was something you used after you shave. Polish at the end, like a finishing step. It made sense to me.
It's backwards. But I've stopped thinking of it as a silly thing to believe, because there's a real reason a lot of us ended up there. More on that in a minute.
Why the order matters
A razor skims across the surface of your skin. That's all it's doing.
If that surface still has a layer of dead, dry skin sitting on top of it, the blade catches on it. It drags. And it misses some of the hair underneath, because the hair is partly buried in that layer.
So you get a shave that isn't as close as it should be, and you get that rough feeling afterward that you assume is stubble. Usually it isn't. It's the dead skin the razor pushed around instead of the hair it was supposed to cut.
Exfoliating first clears that layer off. The razor gets a clean surface to work with. You get a closer shave, and you're less likely to end up with ingrown hairs, because the hair isn't trapped under anything.
Scrubbing after you shave does the opposite. You've just dragged a blade across your skin, and now you're following it with friction on skin that's already been through something. That's usually where the raw, stingy feeling comes from. Not the scrub itself. The timing.
Why so many of us had it backwards
Here's the part I think gets left out of every article about this.
Years ago, a customer told me my scrubs were gumming up her razor. So she'd stopped using them before shaving and switched to after.
She was completely right, and it was my fault, not hers. Those early scrubs were straight coconut oil and sugar. No emulsifier. Which means the oil didn't rinse off. It sat there on your skin as a film, and then you dragged a razor through it. Of course it caught.
So if you've ever tried scrubbing before a shave and ended up with a clogged razor and a bad opinion about it, you weren't doing it wrong. You just had an oil-based scrub, and those genuinely do that.
The ones I make now are emulsified. Without getting too far into it, an emulsifier lets oil and water hold together, so the scrub rinses away with the water instead of sitting on top of your skin. That's the difference. It's also why they feel more like a cream than a jar of oil with sugar in it.
Which means the order can go back to the way that actually works better.
A few other things worth knowing
Order is the big one, but there are a couple of easy ways to overdo it too.
Two or three times a week is plenty. Every single day is too much, even though it feels like more should be better. Your skin needs the days in between to recover. Daily is how you end up irritated and wondering why the product isn't working.
You barely need pressure. The sugar is doing the work. If a scrub has ever felt harsh on your skin, it's usually how hard it's being scrubbed rather than the scrub itself. Light circles. Let it do its thing.
Go easy on the rinse. A good sugar scrub leaves oil behind on purpose. That's most of the point. So if you rinse hard and then soap over the top of it, you've washed off the part that was going to keep your skin soft. Rinse with warm water and stop there.
Skip it on anything broken or already irritated. Sunburn, razor burn, a scrape. Give it a few days. Exfoliating over the top of that just makes it worse.
Sugar or salt?
People ask me this and I don't have a clean answer, honestly.
Salt is coarser. It's more of a soak-and-scrub situation and it can be a lot on skin that's already dry or sun-exposed.
Sugar is gentler and the crystals dissolve as you work, so it softens instead of staying sharp the whole time. For legs in July, when skin has usually been through sun and pool water and air conditioning all week, sugar is the one I reach for.
That's mostly why I make the sugar ones.
What's in mine
I make two scrubs at 9.5 oz, and they're built on the same base: sugar, sweet almond oil, and shea butter. Make sure to use clean, dry hands or a small cosmetic spatula so you're not putting wet hands into the jar, which is what makes a natural product spoil early.
Awaken is bergamot and eucalyptus. Bright and herbal with a little citrus sitting underneath it. It's green because of spirulina powder, not dye. There's French green clay and manuka honey extract in there too.
Purify is juniper berry, cypress, cedarwood, frankincense, and lemon. Woodsy and grounding, with the lemon keeping it from going too heavy. The dark color is activated charcoal. That one also has carrot seed oil.
Both are $24 for a 9.5 oz glass jar.
I also have a few retiring seasonal scrubs left at $12 if you want to try the format without committing to the bigger jar. Those will be gone for good though, so what's in stock is all that's left.
If you only remember one thing
Scrub, then shave. Not the other way around.
It costs you nothing to switch the order, and it makes more difference than almost anything else you could change.
And if you've got a scrub sitting in your shower that's never quite worked for you, send me a message or comment below and tell me which one. Sometimes it's the product, and sometimes it's just the order of operations.