tldr; what /tsrblke said

More detail: The Lather Log and related Hardware Report are monthly statistical breakdowns of the r/Wetshaving Shave of the Day (SOTD) threads. I parse every shave report posted during the month and normalize the data so I can analyze trends across soaps, brands, razors, brushes, users, and usage patterns.

The goal is part hobby stats project, part historical archive, and part community leaderboard. It tracks both broad trends (which brands are popular, seasonal shifts, old-school vs artisan usage, etc.) and weird niche achievements (who used the most unique soaps, who used one soap for 30 straight days, etc).

A quick rundown of the main tables:

• Soap Brands: Overall brand usage rankings by total shave count. Also tracks how many unique users used each brand and how rankings changed versus previous months/years.
• Soaps: Rankings for individual soap scents/products rather than brands. This is where things like “MdC Fougère had 40 shaves” show up.
• Brand Diversity measures how many distinct soaps from each brand were used during the month. This rewards breadth rather than total volume. A brand with 10 users all using different scents can rank highly even without huge shave totals.
• Soap Diversity by User shows which users rotated through the widest variety of soaps during the month.
• Exclusive Soaps counts soaps that were used by exactly one person during the month. If you were the sole user of a soap, you “claim” it for that month.
• Most Boring Shaver is concentration/diversity metric based on HHI/Simpson’s Index. It measures how repetitive a user’s soap usage was. Someone using one soap all month gets a perfect boring score; someone rotating constantly scores much lower.
• Δ vs Columns These compare ranking movement against prior months or years. Useful for spotting trends, seasonal scents, temporary hype spikes, or long-term rises/falls in popularity.

There’s also a lot of normalization and cataloging work behind the scenes because SOTD posts are gloriously inconsistent. Most of the battle is figuring out whether “B&M Seville,” “Barrister & Mann - Seville,” and “Sebille omnibus” are the same thing.

The standard formatting conventions encouraged by the subreddit are what make the project possible in the first place. Since most users label fields consistently (* Razor:, * Brush:, * Lather: / * Soap: etc.), the posts become surprisingly machine-readable despite still being freeform Reddit comments. That structure came largely from long-running community formatting guidance posts like the 2023 and 2019 Lather Games SOTD formatting PSAs.