There is shaving as a morning chore, and there is shaving as a ritual. Santa Maria Novella resolutely chooses the second with L’Art du Rasage, a complete range conceived as a moment for the beard, the skin and the senses rather than a mere act of hygiene. The very name of the line — an art, not a mere routine — announces from the outset the ambition to raise a daily gesture to the rank of a small ceremony.
The range opens with two textures designed to prepare the skin: a rich, refreshing shaving foam, formulated with coconut oil, menthol and eucalyptus leaf oil, and a silkier shaving cream, worked with a brush until a rich, creamy lather is obtained. Both textures share the same olfactory signature, Tabacco Toscano, with smoky and woody notes — a choice that immediately distances the ritual from the usual fragrances sanitised by shaving.
Offering two competing textures for the same gesture — the foam for speed, the cream worked with a brush for the slowness of the traditional gesture — allows the house to address two audiences whose expectations diverge profoundly: those who seek the efficiency of a rushed morning, and those for whom shaving remains a moment in its own right, almost meditative, where the brush gesture counts as much as the final result.
Around this heart of the range, two preparations frame the gesture: a pre- and after-shave cream, formulated with vegetable oils, which softens the skin before the razor passes and helps restore its hydration afterwards, this time scented with the emblematic Melograno fragrance. Then comes the after-shave lotion, whose history goes back to the 1970s, when it was designed to soothe the irritation caused by shaving — a formula that perpetuates, says the house, the Officina’s long-standing shaving tradition.
For the most sensitive skins, an alcohol-free after-shave emulsion completes the range: plant-based ingredients, olive oil, a fragrance with citrus notes inspired by the Mediterranean tradition — bergamot, lemon, bitter orange — for comfortable, fresh skin without the harshness of alcohol. The presence of two distinct after-shave formulas, one historic and alcoholic, the other more recent and designed for reactive skins, illustrates how an old house chooses to widen its offer without giving up its original formulations — even if it means having two generations of care coexist within the same range.
What L’Art du Rasage ultimately tells is the conviction that a gesture repeated every morning deserves as much care as an evening ritual. A way of recalling that sensoriality is not reserved for products kept for great occasions — and that men’s care, long reduced to its practical function alone, can also be told as an art in its own right rather than as a mere hygiene routine, in the same way as the care rituals more fully staged elsewhere in perfumery — the male beard and face deserving, according to the house, the same attention as any other beauty gesture.
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