Wetshaving March Madness 2026

TLDR: Post your SOTD on 3/1 with one of the 16 brands listed below that you want to support and keep alive in the competition. Keep an eye out for a tip-off post closer to month end and ask any questions / start the hype in the comments below.

So what exactly is this event?

The top 16 artisan* brands by usage on r/Wetshaving are competing during the month of March in a Royal Rumble, last man standing, winner takes all shave off.

How to participate?

Every other day in March the competing brands are all going to duke it out for our enjoyment. All you need to do is decide which of the brands still in the competition you want to support that day, use one of their soaps during your shave and post your shave in the daily SOTD thread.

The following day I'll count up the number of uses by each brand and the brand with the fewest shaves will be knocked out while the rest advance to the next day. I'll make a post on the off days announcing who was eliminated, who is left and maybe provide some stats on how things went.

How should you to decide what to use? Follow your heart! There are no guidelines here. Some will pick based on the base performance, some their favorite scent, some will support the underdogs and Team Chaos, some might pick based on the label art, some might even just pick a name out of a hat. And some, in the dead of night, might even turn heel and betray those who were always there for them at a moment when they needed them most.

Our Competitors

A big thanks as always to u/jimm262 for his awesome work on the Lather Log and Hardware Reports, and based upon their 2025 Lather Log you have the following brands to back as your Contender for the title:

1. Stirling Soap Co.
2. Barrister and Mann
3. Catie's Bubbles
4. House of Mammoth
5. Spearhead Shaving Company
6. Noble Otter
7. Mike's Natural Soaps
8. Declaration Grooming
9. Summer Break Soaps
10. Chiseled Face
11. Ariana & Evans
12. Talent Soap Factory
13. Fanzine Saponifications
14. Southern Witchcrafts
15. Zingari Man
16. Chicago Grooming Co.

Interesting mix of brands this year - last year's champion Catie's Bubbles comes back in the 3 slot. Perennial heavyweights Stirling, B&M and HoM round out the rest of the top 4. A few of these brands may have died in the past year, but don't let that distract you from that fact that on this date in 1998, Declaration Grooming threw Southern Witchcrafts off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer's table. Thanks to support from the community here - we have two new Cinderella's in the mix with Mike's and Fanzine Saponifications making their first appearances in March Madness. But that means we are saying goodbye to MacDuff's and Wholly Kaw this year.

Other Rules

1. One vote per day - if you want to have a luxury second shave, by all means shave and post twice, but I'll only count the first SOTD posted.
2. You don't need to use the same brand every round until they are knocked out. Feel free to change brands every single time if you want.
3. Only the soap used counts. I won't be looking at aftershaves/frags used.
4. If the soap is a collaboration I will consider the soap base as who the vote was for. (e.g. Cerberus - scented created by House of Mammoth, but the soap base is Declaration Grooming's, so it would be a vote for DG.)
5. Tiebreaker - if points are tied at the end of a day, I'll use the total number of brand uses in the competition across all days as the first tiebreaker. If the score is still tied after that, I'll use the number of different scents used for that brand that day. If the brands are still tied after that, I'll let Latherbot on Discord decide who lives and who dies.
6. No alt accounts - we want this to be one person, one vote. If we find somebody using an alt account, I'll stop counting all the shaves from all of that user's accounts.
7. As always - no dogs.

Post Formatting

While not required to participate, having a consistent SOTD post format helps me out a great deal with scraping the post each day to count up the votes. Ideally you have your soap/lather on it's own line with soap: or lather: at the beginning. If you aren't sure if your formatting is up to snuff, you can't go wrong with using the standard Lather Games formatting.

In Reddit Markdown, a shave needs to be formatted like this with two Spaces at the end of each line to force a line-break:

* **Prep:** Brand - Product Name
* **Brush:** Brand and Model
* **Razor:** Brand and Model
* **Blade:** Brand and Type
* **Lather:** Brand - Product Name
* **Post Shave:** Brand - Product Name (post shave products are optional)
* **Fragrance:** Brand - Product Name (Fragrances are optional)

Schedule of Events

Date	Eliminated
3/1/2024	TBD
3/3/2024	TBD
3/5/2024	TBD
3/7/2024	TBD
3/9/2024	TBD
3/11/2024	TBD
3/13/2024	TBD
3/15/2024	TBD
3/17/2024	TBD
3/19/2024	TBD
3/21/2024	TBD
3/23/2024	TBD
3/25/2024	TBD
3/27/2024	TBD
3/29/2024	TBD