Nope, no site reboot today, I’m afraid. There are still some kinks to be worked out with the new layout, and some of the old links and pics weren’t working right with Today’s WordPress aka Blogger For Masochists (“Now With 10% Less Banging Your Against Your Desk!”), so give me a few more days of forehead bruising and I should have something a lot nicer and much more readable for you to look at and then say “Meh” about.

Meantime, here’s a little ditty to tide you over.

Corey,

Rachel

Ah, Rachel.

You women have always gotten the shaft from Big Shaving. Like tampons, lady razors suck because they’ve always been designed by men who’ve never had to use them.

I wouldn’t begin to lecture you on the proper gear for gam shaving. I’ve never done it myself, though I did shave my armpits once, in high school, while talking on the phone with my girlfriend who was simultaneously shaving her own — it was actually kind of thrilling and kinky and constituted the only time in my life I’ve engaged in something that could broadly be considered phone sex aside from calling Barney Greengrass to place an order to go.

So my resident gam shaving expert is Beloved Wife, whose legs are as easily nicked as my neck has always been. When I started getting better shaves with brushes and good creams, she ported them over to her gams and did her own research into the matter. Some things she found: a shaving brush isn’t really needed for a woman’s legs, and a single-blade DE or Injector razor takes ages to shave a pair of legs with and doesn’t really give better gamshave than a good twin-blade. But she did find that the better creams (her favorite is Cremo Cream) really did protect her skin better and let her shave more closely and comfortably without nicks. Fortunately for Cremo, she’s not as bothered by the pansy-ass Pina Colada scent as I am (memo to Cremo: when you come out with a shaving cream that smells like bacon, or Dogfish Head 120 Minute, or (dare I dream?) both of them as you chew a huge mouthful of beer and bacon, do a brother a solid and tweet me.)

More gamshave wisdom via the better half: Exfoliating is bullshit. Makes your skin feel softer for a few hours but does nothing for shaving, no matter what the sites selling “shaving loofas” say. What really matters — as always, whether you’re shaving your face or your legs, is softening the whiskers with water and using a good blade. Water is absorbed into the hair and changes its character from copper wire to wet noodle, and wet noodle is most certainly what you want when it comes to good shaving. It takes two minutes for human hair to absorb water and become soft enough to slice through cleanly and easily, so showering before you shave, not after, will do wonders for your legs.

According to Beloved Wife and every female I know, the twin-blade Sensor For Women is the best lady razor in current production. The 3 and 5-blade razors sold to Women under such names as Venus couldn’t possibly be less good for your legs if they had SARS virus built into the lubricating strips. I know men are stupid, buying this crap up by the hectare, but you women are too smart to fall for this nonsense. Avoid any razor with more than 2 blades. Loathe as I am to recommend anything Proctor and Gamble sells, Beloved Wife swears to me that the Sensor For Women is a good gam shaver, which doesn’t surprise me seeing as how the Sensor Excel for men, which uses the same blade carridges, is the only thing Gillette still makes these days that doesn’t wholly suck.

That said, here’s a dirty little secret: the men’s cartridges are better than what Gillette sells to women. A lot better. The white plastic Sensor For Women cartridges are markedly inferior to the grey plastic Sensor cartridges sold to men, even though they both fit all Sensor razors. Don’t believe me? Neither did Beloved Wife, until she tried a men’s Sensor blade in her razor and was shocked by the improvement. Those white Sensor cartridges are nasty business — wouldn’t surprise me a bit if they were seconds off the production line, marketed as gam shavers instead of the off-spec rejects they are. Fit your Lady Sensor with man blades and you’ll be much happier with the cut.

As Beloved Wife discovered, the really good creams like Cremo make all the difference, but maybe you don’t want to spend $20 a tube when you use so much more of this stuff per shave than us men do. So here’s another trick: an economical alternative to high-end shaving cream is plain old hair conditioner, which actually works crazily well as a shaving cream for women’s legs as long as you don’t expect thick, rich, foamy lather. It softens the whiskers and gives great lubrication. Doesn’t need to be the fancy stuff, either — Suave conditioner works just as well as anything else I’ve tried. After showering, apply a liberal amount of hair conditioner to your legs and leave it on for at least a minute before you start shaving. Works a treat as my British editor used to say, and even I hit the conditioner for a shower shave every once in awhile when I’m running late and don’t have time for my usual Little Lord Fountleroy joie de beauty routine that wows them at dropoff/pickup.

As for your husband and his Injector lust, I’ll have more to say once I get this @%#$ blog rebooted with a fresh new coat of paint. I gave up on the Injector a few years ago when Schick switched production of its blades to a new supplier and the quality dropped like a stone. But I just can’t quit this beautiful razor. More to say later.

When I first got hooked on shaving with old safety razors, I started out with the classic double-edge DE. And I loved this type of razor to death until my pal Gordon (not this Gordon — this Gordon) turned me onto the other classic safety razor from wetshaving's golden era — the almighty Schick Injector.

At which point I went on a serious, serious bender with these things. Wouldn't shave with anything else, yoinked as many off eBay as I could, and marveled at how a single-blade safety razor could have zero learning curve compared with a DE and yet shave just as well and maybe even better (actually, so ungodly close my face tingled for an hour and stayed stubble-free till well after I finally went to bed after staying up late to make bloggedy fun of guys who need to ask other guys how to get your face wet with water).

The Injector I love the most is the early version from the 1940's, with the big brass head and the bakelite handle. These 40's Injectors look cooler and show more blade than the later Schicks — feed them with modern Schick or Personna Injector blades, or better yet, cut-down Feather disposable straight razor blades and you'll get a shave so close and so easy it almost takes the fun out of it.

By the mid-'50's, though, the Injector took a serious aesthetic nose-dive. The stylish brass shaving head was replaced by a generic stamped-metal assembly, and the cool-man bakelite handles gave way to plastic, and it's that embarassingly cheap, low-rent plastic that doesn't age well at all and never quite gets clean no matter how hard you scrub it, so there's always that sinking feeling as you try not to think about who may have used that razor and where they might have shaved themselves before you wound up with it. I've tried boiling these things and they just melt like snowflakes. Hit 'em with bleach and the cheap metal plating on the head corrodes. You can boil and scrub the hell out of an old Gillette DE till it looks brand spanking new, but funky Schick Injectors from the 50s/60s/70s/80s stay funky for life.

Gordon, our pal Andy and me all have our stashes of vintage Injectors and we swap interesting specimens back and forth for kicks, but we keep having the same conversation about how insanely great it would be if someone came out with a really upscale Injector, something along the lines of the luxurious chrome-plated DE razors Edwin-Jagger makes in the UK. Something really beefy and elegant, as nice to hold as it is to look at.

So imagine my surprise a few months ago when I learned that an outfit called Nationwide Campus was planning to sell newly-manufactured reissues of the 1965 Schick Adjustable Injector and the 1999 "Type O" non-adjustable Injector sold primarily in Japan for the last few years before Schick finally pulled the plug entirely. These razors are officially available today, for $15.99 and $14.99 respectively (plus $5.88 S/H). So for twenty clams you can have a brand new, mint condition Injector. Sounds good, yes?

Nationwide Campus didn't ring any shavegeek bells, though. Frankly, I'd never heard of them till I caught wind of their planned reissues. I figured that if someone was going to come out with a new Injector, it would be one of the established high-end manufacturers like Jagger or Merkur. They certainly have the tooling in place — all they'd need to do would be to make an Injector-compatible head and screw it onto one of their thick brass handles, and then hold out a big net to catch all the shekels raining down on their heads from the four corners of Planet Shavegeek.

So who's Nationwide Campus? Well, it's not a high-end manufacturer of upscale shaving tools. This much I know. The rest is a little murky. From all outward appearances, Nationwide Campus is a kind of "jobber" web site that sells commodity-type items like NBA fan jerseys, batteries, disposable douches, bar stools, cheap perfume, and classy chairs. It's sort of the online equivalent of a truck stop in Oklahoma that's got shelf after shelf filled with driftwood Jesus clocks, or when you find yourself on the wrong side of town and there's all these dollar stores that stretch for entire city blocks with Tazmanian Devil beach towels piled up on the sidewalks next to enormous oil paintings of naked black women lolling around with leopards like that one above Scatman Crother's bed in "The Shining". You know the drill.

I called Nationwide Campus a few weeks ago and spoke to Jay, the VP of Sales. Ordinarily I'd applaud a man's gruff disinterest in shavegeekery and the fetishization of a grooming tool designed to remove facial hair, but jeez, I don't know, I guess I was hoping for a little more zazz from a guy who was about to relaunch the Injector. 

"So how did this project come about?" I asked him.

"I sent some razors to a factory and had them copy them," Jay replied.

"So where are they made?"

Silence. 

"Overseas."

"So, China or India?"

Silence. 

"Overseas."

And that was pretty much that. A man of few words, and many units to move. But I was curious, and a pathetic Injector fanboy, so I pre-ordered one of the non-adjustable razors and tried to keep an open mind about it.

I don't mean to pick on Jay and Nationwide. He's a warehouse jobber, after all, not a Kool-Aid chugging happytime shavegeek. And more power to him — there's a hell of a lot more people in this world who need these than need quality razors. God knows Schick was never a high-end boutique brand, and neither was Gillette. Only a fool like me constructs elaborate fantasies about old Italian artisans hunched over workbenches of golden oak, holding a loupe to their good eye as they carve endless, perfect ridges into nickel-plated razor handles while Verdi hangs softly in the Florentine air.

So last week I got the new NatCamp Injector in, and took it for a few test shaves. But first, I want to show you something:

This is the lowliest non-adjustable Schick Injector I've got — it's a "Type J1" from the early '60s, with the rancid off-(i.e. once)-white plastic handle and the generic stamped-metal head that always jiggles loosely on these handles due to nobody giving a shit by this point. But despite all this, it shaves like a dream, like all the Injectors do, even the fugly ones. Because when it came to tooling the blade mechanism and exposure gap — where the rubber meets the road — Schick got it nuts-on. And it's something you can feel no matter what Injector you shave with.   

Now here's the new Nationwide Campus reissue: 

Tell me something: which razor would you rather load a sharp blade into and scrape across your face? The Schick looks straight as an arrow while the NatCamp's got "cheap Chinese knock-off" written all over it. From the bent safety bar to the ragged metal edges to the cheap rubber handle insert to the unacceptably loose tolerances all around, it's a disgrace. Only a callow, easily-impressed chump would be taken in by this kind of cheesy build quality. Even with a new Schick blade installed, the middle part of the head assembly moves side to side, taking the blade along with it.

Still, my Type J1 Injector isn't a prize pig at the county fair either, and it shaves like a madman. Sometimes looks are deceiving.

Except when they're an excellent indicator of the road ahead, which they definitely are in the case of this reissue. Right off the bat, despite my usual lather o' the gods courtesy of Nancy Boy's shaving cream and Simpson's Wee Scot shaving brush, the NatCamp nicked me something fierce on my neck and left me with a nice red ingrown hair bump — my first in well over a year. It's still there as I type this, and probably has a few more days to go. The next morning I decided to give the razor a second chance, and I got a second ingrown for a matched set. Lovely.

As far as the rest of the shave went, it reminded me less of a real Injector and more of how a Mach3 or a Quattro cuts. Like you're scraping your face something fierce, but then after you rinse off at the end and feel your skin, you can still feel stubble. That's the kind of shave I got from the reissue.

I've got dozens of genuine Schick Injectors, and even my least favorite of the bunch shaves circles around this Nationwide Campus razor. From the earliest all-brass "scissor handle" Injector to the gaggle of 40's bakelite jobs to the alloy-handled "Type F" to the boring but shaveworthy "Type L" (I've even got a few "Lady Eversharp" gam'n'minge razors that to be quite honest are excellent men's razors, pink handles and all), there's a certain face-feel to the classic Schick Injector shave that carries over from version to version. Sadly, there isn't even a hint of this quality in the knock-off.

Now, I don't have a real "Type O" to compare it with, so it's entirely possible that the Nationwide Campus reissue is simply a perfectly executed clone of a lousy razor. But if that's the case, why choose a lousy razor to knock off in the first place? Why not reissue a good Injector like the '40s bakelite model? My suspicion is that the Type O wasn't the best-ever Injector, but neither was it as rough or cheaply manufactured as this Chinese knock-off.

It's a real drag, because I was hoping against all odds that this new razor might be something I could recommend to guys who are itching to try an Injector without going the eBay route. But it doesn't even come close to delivering the classic Injector shave. Honestly, I get better shaves from cheap Bic single-edge disposables. It's fitting that Nationwide Campus's reissue doesn't actually have the name "Injector" anywhere on it. It's not a worthy representative of the breed. 

My advice is to avoid this thing at all costs. Until someone more quality-minded (Jagger! Jagger!) decides to take a stab at it, your $20 is better spent buying a real Injector on eBay and getting the shave you deserve.    

Thank you, Peter Jaret, for the nice writeup in today's Times! For Times readers checking Shaveblog out for the first time, I thought it might be good to repost the oft-linked wetshaving primer I wrote last year that started all of this — the Today Show segment, the MSNBC article, the old-school shaving boom, and this blog. I've updated the text with new tips and links I've picked up since the original article ran, so if you're interested in seeing what all the fuss is about, read on:

The Perfect Shave

Corey Greenberg

 

Ever since prehistoric man first scraped a seashell across his cheek so prehistoric woman would let him dance cheek-to-cheek, shaving has been a part of the male experience. But even with today's high-tech razors, lots of men still get nicks, cuts, and razor burn. That's why the latest trend in male grooming, "wetshaving", promises a better shave by going back to the old school.

The perfect shave is what all men strive for every morning when they bring their razor up to their chin — an effortless shave that's baby smooth, and without any of the usual skin irritation, redness, and that burning sensation most guys seem to feel is par for the course when it comes to shaving.

Why do so many guys find this so hard to achieve? Because proper shaving has become a lost art. Shaving is one of those glorious male traditions that used to be passed down from father to son, but somewhere along the line, when shaving became more about cheap, disposable razors than a nice, precision-made metal tool in your hand, it became a brainless routine to rush through in the morning without even thinking about it.

A disposable or cartridge razor dragged across a layer of foam or gel on your dry cheek is a step backward from the past, not an improvement. Now that men of all ages are paying more attention to their appearance, it's no wonder that the hottest trend right now in male grooming is a return to the traditional wet shave. And those who try it are shocked to discover that the "old-fashioned" method of shaving they thought went out with the Hula Hoop is actually the best quality shave they can get.

Wetshaving is just what the term implies — keeping your face wet with plenty of hot water before and during the entire shave. In fact, you should always shave after a hot shower, not before (if you need to shave without taking a shower, try washing your face with hot water for a few minutes).

Believe it or not, but your whiskers are tougher tha the edge of a razor blade, and shaving "dry", or mostly dry as with the vast majority of shaving creams, foams, and gels on the market, means you're literally tugging on each and every hair on your face instead of neatly slicing it at the skin's surface and moving on without irritating your skin.

With a layer of hot water between your skin and the lather, the blade skims the surface instead of dragging on it, which is the main cause of irritation, redness, and "shave bumps". Most men are astonished the first time they have a proper wet shave, because the razor no longer pulls, tugs, and otherwise fights the whiskers — it just glides over your skin leaving a clean path in its wake.

 

The perfect shave has three ingredients: a good razor, a good brush, and glycerin-based shaving cream. But the biggest difference between wetshaving and the way most guys shave today is the use of a shaving brush. A good badger-hair shaving brush is the single most important ingredient in getting the perfect shave — if you change no part of your shaving routine except to add a good shaving brush to the mix, you'll be astounded at how much better and more enjoyable your shaves become.

Take it from a guy who used to use his fingers to smear cheap shaving gel on his face that smelled just like his deodorant — using a fine badger hair brush to lather high-end English shaving cream that smells like fresh-cut violets onto your face and neck isn't just about treating yourself nicely after years of the ol' slice'n'dice. It's also the best possible way to prepare your skin and whiskers for the closest, most comfortable shave.

A shaving brush isn't a paint brush for your face. A good brush — the best brushes are made of badger hair and start at $25 — absorbs hot water and then, after you dip the tip of the brush into your shaving cream, the brush releases and mixes the hot water with the cream as you swirl the brush around on your face and neck. The combination of hot water mixing with the cream and getting beaten by the brush all over your face delivers a thicker, richer, more emollient lather than you can get from a can, no matter what the brash young He-Men in the commercials with no hair on their chests wearing a bath towel being playfully tugged at by a gyrating tigress may tell you.

A shaving brush also gently exfoliates, or removes the dead skin, from your face before shaving, which gets rid of anything coming between the blade and your whiskers. Finally, the brush lifts your whiskers and suspends them standing upright in the thick lather, which exposes the maximum whisker length to your blade as it skims along your face. Never mind that using a shaving brush feels really, really good on your face right after a nice hot shower — it happens to be the very best way to prepare your face for the shave of your life.

High quality badger hair shaving brushes come in all sizes and hair types, costing anywhere from $25 for a basic "pure" or "fine" grade badger model to $550 for a monster-sized, high-end "silvertip" job. Do you need a $550 shaving brush? Unless you're Mr. Burns, the answer is no. I've tried a lot of shaving brushes over the years, from the entry-level to the obscenely expensive, and I got no better lather or shave from the expensive brushes than I do with the reasonably priced brushes I finally settled on. Once you go above $75 or so, you're paying for snob/collector appeal, not a better shave.

Most shavegeeks go for the biggest brush they can hoist, but I get the best results with the small-to-medium sized brushes like the $55 Vulfix #2233 and Simpson's almost comically small $65 Wee Scot. They're a lot easier to use, you don't get sloppy lather flying everywhere like you do with the bigger brushes, and you don't wind up dumping a lot of unused lather down the drain. They're also the perfect size to throw in your dopp kit for travel (hey, why shave like a heathen when you're on the road?).

I recommend the English-made Vulfix brushes as the best bang for the buck. They're much more reasonably priced than a lot of high-end British shaving brushes, and they lather right up there with the best of them. The brush shown above is Vulfix's #2233, which is a medium-sized "super" grade brush that hits the sweet spot for size, price, and performance — at just $55, the Vulfix puts far more expensive brushes to shame when it comes to building world-class lather.

 

The Safety Razor

 

The next tool you need for wetshaving is a razor. And by razor, I mean whatever high-quality, non-disposable razor you feel most comfortable with. I know, I know, disposables are cool because that's what they hand out in jail. But most disposables are extremely hard on your skin because the quality of the blades isn't as good as a cartridge razor, or better yet, the kind of razor that serious wetshavers use: the classic double-edge safety razor.

A DE razor is the kind that takes a single, disposable razor blade, and it's the same type of razor that your father, your grandfather, Cary Grant, Lee Marvin, JFK, and John Wayne used. Take it from me — the classic DE wipes the floor with any modern razor, I don't care how many blades it's got or whether it buzzes like a vibrating egg. Ever since I switched to using a DE razor from a Mach3, I've gotten much closer and more comfortable shaves, my face doesn't burn at all anymore, and all the red irritation on my neck I thought was there for good went away completely.

DE razors are also the best choice for African-American men, many of whom suffer from "shave bumps", which occur when their tougher whiskers are cut too aggressively by modern multi-blade razors, causing them to grow back underneath the skin and turn into ingrown hairs. Switching to a DE and using a shaving brush to exfoliate the skin and prep the whiskers is good for men of all races, but African-American men in particular find that shaving with a safety razor clears up their skin and makes shaving a pleasure again.

The men's grooming boom has created a huge resurgence of interest in vintage safety razors. Gillette's fixed-head and adjustable DEs from the 1940s and 50s are the most highly-coveted safety razors, and with good reason — they shave like a dream, look impossibly cool, and last forever. Your best bet is eBay, but be forewarned that even if you find one for a good price ($10-20), you'll most likely have to boil it for 10 mins and scrub it with a toothbrush and some Bar Keeper's Friend cleanser before you raise it to your chin. I like the 40s Super Speed and 50s short-handled Adjustable Gillettes the best, and the older 3-piece Gillettes the least.

Another great safety razor to be on the lookout for is the classic Schick Injector. While Schick stopped making these single-edge razors awhile back, they still make the blades (I buy mine at Amazon.com!). The Schick Injector is an interesting safety razor, because it's' the "missing link" between the old-school DE and the modern multi-blade. It's a single-blade razor, but its shaving head is angled more like a cartridge razor, and most newbies find it much easier to immediately grok when coming over from a Mach3, etc.

Like a DE, Injectors shave circles around modern razors. In fact, Injector blades are noticeably thicker than a DE's, so they shave almost like a mini straight razor — amazingly close, yet much more comfortably than a multi-blade. I've got a few vintage bakelite-handled Shick/Eversharp Injectors from the '40s that shave as well as any razor I own, not to mention the fact that they look infinitely mo' bitchin' than some faux-metallic plastic stick with bright neon-colored rubber nubbies.

As cool as these vintage razors are, some guys feel more comfortable using a brand new razor that's never stroked another fella's puss. Personally, I think it would be cool to shave with an old razor that used to belong to, say, Cary Grant, but the fact is, a goodly number of eBay razors have been at one time or another up a hobo's ass. I'm not saying all of them were, or even that most of them were, but you have to accept that some of these vintage safety razors must have gone Papillon at some point. So if you absolutely positively want to avoid going there, the good news is that there are new safety razors available that are every bit as good as many vintage models. 

The German company Merkur offers a whole range of extremely high-quality safety razors, with their biggest bang for the buck being the HD "Hefty Classic". It's an excellent razor to start with if you've decided to take the DE plunge, and lots of guys love it so much they won't shave with anything else. I love the HD and highly recommend it — it's a simple, no-nonsense, astonishingly effective DE that shaves me as close as anything else I've tried, price be damned.

A razor's only as good as the blade you feed it. Unlike modern cartridge razors, though, DE razors offer you lots of choices when it comes to blades. Some DE blades are mild and forgiving, others are scary-sharp and prone to nicks if you don't know what you're doing. The German Merkur Platinum blades are sold by most vendors who sell Merkur's razors and they're of good quality, but I find these blades can be iconsistent and not terribly forgiving for the first-time wetshaver, so I don't recommend them if you're just starting out.

A much better choice would be the American Personna relabeled "house brand" blades you find in drugstores, which are inexpensive and much smoother than the Merkurs. Even better are the $25/100 Personna blades made in Israel, aka the "no-name" marked simply "Super+" which can be bought in boxes of 100 for $25 on eBay or here.

The Israeli "no-names" are my favorite DE blades of all, because they're incredibly smooth, forgiving, and easy on the face, yet in a good vintage Gillette or new Merkur they can deliver that perfect, baby's butt shave at the very heart of the shavegeek trip. I wish I'd known about these blades when I first picked up a DE, because they would've saved me a lot of time and claret. 

At the other end of the spectrum are the Japanese Feather High Stainless Platinum blades. These are easily the sharpest, most unforgiving DE blades on the market. My skin can't cope with the Feather blades without nicks galore, but I know shavegeeks who won't feed their DEs any other blade. The Feather Platinums can deliver a skin-peeling shave in the right hands, but I don't recommend them for newbies, or even seasoned wetshavers with sensitive skin.

Ironically, the DE blades Gillette sells in the US are, quite literally, the worst a man can get — harsh, rough, and so bad you'd be forgiven for thinking they were made that way on purpose to get you to ditch the DE and use a Fusion instead. However, I'll let you in on a little insider's secret — Gillette makes a very different DE blade in Sweden for the European market which is superb, but you can only get them overseas or online. They're a bit too sharp for the first-timer, but once you're able to get good shaves with a Merkur or Personna blade in your DE, try a "Swede" in your razor for a shave that's closer than close.

  

 

 

The Shaving Cream

 

A high-quality, glycerin-based shaving cream is the final ingredient in the perfect shave. If your shaving cream/gel comes in a can and costs less than a coffee at Starbucks, or even Dunkin’ Donuts for that matter (and their joe’s better besides), prepare to be astonished at what old-school shaving cream lathers, shaves, and above all, smells like. Yes, I said smells like! If you’ve never lathered up in the morning with a fine English shaving cream that smells like fresh-cut violets, limes, or lavender, then you are truly missing out on one of the great manly pleasures.

The Brits have been making this stuff for centuries, and they really do make some of the best shaving creams on the planet. At around $20 for a tub and $12 for a travel tube, they may seem a bit more expensive than the foams and gels at the drugstore, but since a little goes a long way when lathered with a shaving brush, these high-end creams are actually a good value and last for many months of daily shaving.

I use and recommend Geo F. Trumper’s and Taylor of Old Bond Street’s shaving creams in both tubs for the bathroom and small tubes for travel. My personal favorites are Trumper’s Violet, and Taylor’s Avocado and Rose creams — these shaving creams will spoil you rotten for anything else when lathered onto your face with hot water and a badger shaving brush. And the intoxicating scents of these top-shelf creams will make you actually look forward to shaving, probably for the first time in your life.

The Art of Shaving makes a nice shaving cream as well, in the old-school English style. I especially like their Lavender cream, made with real lavender essential oil. AOS has shops all over the country and its products can be found in many mall’s men’s departments, where it’s usually the only good shaving cream in the display case.

I also recommend the legendary eucalyptus shaving cream from Italy called Proraso. This $7 wonder comes in a large, bright green toothpaste tube, and has been the best-selling shaving product in Italy since the 1940s. Despite its budget price, Proraso actually shaves on a par with the fancy English creams, and it has the added benefit of eucalyptus oil, which gives your face an incredible cooling effect when you splash with cold water at the end of the shave. Like the Trumper and Taylor shaving creams, you can buy Proraso online, but you might also check your local Target, as the chain recently began carrying Proraso’s entire line of old-school shaving products.

While most of the boutique “upscale” shaving creams marketed to young guys and metrosexuals are crap, two “new-school” shaving creams recently hit the market that give the best English creams a run for their money. London’s Truefitt & Hill has been around since 1805 (a full century before King Gillette invented the safety razor!), andwhile the venerated English firm’s traditional shaving creams are excellent, their new Ultimate Comfort unscented shaving cream is their best yet. Creamier and kinder to sensitive skin, the Ultimate Comfort is an easy recommendation.

 

 

My favorite shaving cream these days is Nancy Boy’s amazing lavender, peppermint, and rosemary scented cream. It’s extremely skin-friendly and chock full of beneficial ingredients like avocado oil, aloe, allantoin, cucumber extract, Vitamin E, and genuine lavender, peppermint, and rosemary essential oils, with no harsh soaps or artificial fragrance. The Nancy Boy shaving cream also works well brushless, if you’re in a hurry. But lather this stuff up with a good badger brush and it just doesn’t get any better – my skin feels much more moisturized after a shave with Nancy Boy than with any other shaving cream I’ve used. If I could only shave with one cream, this would be it. 

 

How To Shave Like A Man

 

After you emerge from a nice, hot shower, fill the sink with hot water and let your shaving brush soak in it. Splash some more hot water on your face to keep it wet. The key to wetshaving is keeping your face wet throughout the shave, so the blade never comes in contact with dry skin.

Remove your brush from the water, hold it bristles-down, and give it a slight shake to get rid of the excess water. You want some water in the brush to make good lather, but not so much water that your lather turns out thin and runny.

Open your tub of shaving cream, scoop out about a nickel-sized dollop of cream with your finger, and place it on the wet tips of your brush’s bristles. Some guys swirl the brush and cream in a mug or bowl to build up their lather, while others just cup their other hand and build up the lather in that. I like to cut to the chase and build the lather directly on my face by swirling the brush around on my neck, chin, and cheeks till I’ve got a nice, thick layer of opaque lather.

Once you’ve lathered your face and neck, stand your brush up on the counter and pick up your razor. The first thing you need to know is that a safety razor doesn’t have a pivoting head, so unlike a Mach3 or a Fusion, the blade doesn’t hug your face no matter how half-assed you are with the razor. So you’ll need to maintain the right blade angle yourself. Sounds difficult, but after a shave or two, most guys grok it just fine. You want to shoot for a blade angle of approximately 30 degress — not so shallow the blade misses the whiskers, and not so high you scrape your skin instead of shave it clean. It may take a shave or seven before you get this down, but once you do you’ll be amazed at how close a single-blade razor can shave without pulling on your whiskers and burning your skin like modern multi-blades do.

At first, you want to shave downward on your face and neck, with the direction your whiskers grow. A North-to-South shave will get rid of most visible stubble without irritating your skin. If you want a shave that feels baby’s butt smooth to the touch, wet your face again, lather up again, and shave very lightly upward against the grain. If you can’t shave against the grain without irritation, try a second N-S downward shave. In most cases, you’ll approach that baby’s butt smoothness without any of the razor burn that a S-N pass gives most guys. But I’m not going to lie to you — if you want baby's butt, shave upward, young man. Just do it as lightly as possible and only do it for one pass, after you shave downward first to clear most of the bramble.

Once you’re done shaving, rinse your face with cold water to close the pores, and thoroughly rinse your razor and shaving brush of lather. Shake your brush a few times to dry it, wipe it gently on your towel, and stand it on its handle to finish drying. This will let the bristles air-dry without damaging them, so your brush will last 20 years or more.

Pat, don’t rub, your face dry with a clean towel, and finish up with a good non-alcohol-based after-shave or moisturizer — Trumper’s Skin Food is one of the best, but any good moisturizer will be better than that stinging alcohol-based stuff that we’ve all suffered with. Some guys swear by witch hazel, which is cheap, good, and perfect for closing your pores and soothing your face. Lately I’ve been using moisturizing oils like Jojoba and rosehip seed oil, and my skin has never been happier after a shave.

CAUTION!

If you’ve been shaving with a disposable razor or one of the modern multi-blade cartridge systems like the Mach3, be aware that switching to a single-blade DE will require that you un-learn all the bad habits that modern razors are designed to let sleepy, lazy guys get away with. Mainly, that means slower, more careful strokes, and guiding the blade over your skin without pressing down too much.

Let me say that again.

Without pressing down too much.

It’s really not a big deal — men have been shaving this way for over a hundred of years, well before plastic disposables and 5-blade razors were invented. Once you slow down and stop pressing the blade against your face so hard, you’ll find that not only do you get a closer, smoother shave, but all of that burning sensation and red marks all over your neck will start to go away immediately, and then disappear for good.

If you end up with a few nicks your first few shaves with a DE, don’t worry, it happened to all of us — your grandpa, Lee Marvin, and me — when we first picked up a safety razor. It’s your face’s way of telling you to stop being a knucklehead. After a few shaves, you’ll figure it all out, and then you’ll wonder why you haven’t been shaving like this your whole life.

 

Copyright 2006 Corey Greenberg

Before I begin today’s entry, an introduction of a new feature here at Shaveblog — the dreaded SOTD, or Shave Of The Day. You know, when a guy lists the products he shaved with that day. Ewww, right? I used to see these “SOTD” posts on the shavegeek forums and cringe, but then I started keeping a blog about shaving, which is even lamer. So, in response to reader requests, the inaugural SOTD —

Taylor’s Rose shaving cream, Vulfix #2234 brush, Gillette Super Speed DE razor, Trumper’s Coral Skin Food.

Over Thanksgiving I bonded with my dad over shaving, which was nice. Then my brother piped in and started complaining about his shaves — even with the face-numbing Lab Series “Maximum Comfort” shaving cream I’d turned him on to years ago before I knew better, he still hates shaving with a Mach3. Hates the shave, hates the high cost. Hates it all.

So I promised him I’d put together a custom rig when we got home from Thanksgiving and ship it off to him. I’d given my dad a vintage Gillette Super Speed, a Vulfix #377 badger brush, and a tube of Trumper’s Violet shaving cream, but I went in a different direction with my brother. He’s got a much heavier beard than mine and my dad’s, plus he’s not really the kind of guy who’s going to loll around in the bathroom getting ready in the morning.

I’d already sent him a Vulfix brush eons ago, so he had that base covered. For the rest of the rig, I sent him the most no-brainer, quick and easy, thoroughly effective and totally excellent wetshaving newbie setup I could think of:

Nancy Boy shaving cream. I’ve gushed over this insanely great, reasonably priced, great smelling, super moisturizing shaving cream before. Suffice it to say, the Nancy Boy’s become one of my favorite shaving creams. It’s half the price of comparable English creams like Trumper, and where else are you going to find a gay-themed shaving cream that’s “tested on boyfriends, not animals”?

Schick Injector razor. The easiest safety razor of them all, yet perfect for heavier beards due to the thicker blade. I sent my brother one of my best Injectors, a 1940′s bakelite-handled job that’s clean as a whistle. I wish I’d known how much easier Injectors are to get up to speed with when you’re moving over from a modern razor like the Mach3 — it took me a few weeks to get comfortable with my first Merkur DE, but my very first shave with an Injector was a world-beater.

Schick Injector blades. Amazon’s always had the lowest price online for these excellent blades at $4.25 per 7-pack, but tonight I checked Drugstore.com and they’ve just dropped their price to $3.84. Free shipping on both sites if you buy enough blades to last you for awhile, which only makes sense.

My brother got the package yesterday, along with a printout of my original article on wetshaving I wrote to accompany my Today Show segment earlier this year, so tomorrow will be his first-ever old-school wetshave. I don’t want to turn my brother into a shavegeek, but I’d love it if this rig gives him a better shave and turns the ritual into something pleasant instead of a drag every morning.

One of the nice things about shaving with a safety razor is the sheer number of different options you have. If you go with a traditional DE, there are dozens of razors to choose from — vintage Gillette adjustables (long or short handles, stainless steel or gold), vintage Gillette non-adjustables (both twist-to-open and screw-off models, as well as open-comb and safety-bar), modern Merkurs (as well as all the razors that use Merkur heads on fancy handles — Edwin Jagger, Trumper, et al), old (and even new) Wilkinsons, Schicks, and I’m sure there’s more I’m forgetting.

Speaking of Schick, if you decide to go with an Injector-type safety razor, the company made all kinds of different versions — the oldest pre-Injector magazine repeaters in solid brass, the bakelite and celluloid handled 1940′s models with the gold-plated brass heads, the plastic handled 70s and 80s models (some with tennis racket style handles and stick shift knobs), the adjustables, and the final version that still sold in Japan until very recently. Schick even made ladies Injectors (as did Gillette with its DE’s) in several styles, with long handle, short handle, and no handle.

So with all these choices for what type of razor best suits each individual, you’d think even the most quarrelsome and obtuse shavegeek would recognize the lunacy of the very notion of a “best” razor, as well as the lunacy of arguing with others that they’re idiots for not agreeing with him.

And you’d be wrong.

It’s really quite a fascinating phenomenon, this shavegeek fascism. There’s one geek in particular who I’m fairly certain is really just an auto-bot — a line or two of code some prankster dumped into the shavegeek forums like a virus that pops up and spits out the same hostile text every time certain keywords are posted:

1. IF “feather” THEN “Feather DE blades are the best blades and make everything else look like a joke, and if you don’t like them then you don’t know how to shave because I’ve been doing it for 40 years and you’re WRONG!”

2. IF “gillette” THEN “Gillette DE razors are cheap toys compared to Merkurs and you obviously don’t know what a great razor is because I can’t get a good shave with a Gillette and I’ve been shaving for 40 years and you’re WRONG!”

3. IF “futur” THEN “The Merkur Futur razor has been around since 1965 because I got one in 1965 and you don’t know anything so why don’t you shut up because I have proof that the Futur existed in 1965 because here is the one that I have and I got it in 1965 and I’ve been shaving for 40 years and you’re WRONG!”

The last line of code is particularly amusing, given that Merkur itself says it introduced the Futur in the 1985, there isn’t a single record anywhere on the Web of this razor ever existing before that date, and other wetshavers who’ve also been shaving for 40 years don’t recall ever seeing this Merkur till the mid-80′s, when the company says it first hit the market.

Normally I cut guys slack with dates because I’m bad about them myself, but twenty years off? Can someone really confuse 1965 with 1985? The Beatles with Ah-Ha (the only group ever to have their tour sponsored by Agree Shampoo)?

None of this really matters except that it’s funny, like someone peeing their name in the snow and getting a letter backwards. You chuckle and then you give that guy a wide berth, because he might not be through marking.

Anyway, back to reality. I couldn’t bring myself to shave with that Wallace and Gromit shaving foam I wrote about yesterday. Just couldn’t do it. Wanted to. Thought about it. But once the nostalgia of that foamy scent and the theme music from “The Way We Were” faded away, I remembered that razor burn I used to get from this kind of stuff back in the day — that scrapy, scratchy kind of shave that left me red and stinging, and led me, finally, to seek out the kind of high-quality shaving creams I get much more comfortable shaves with today.

So I lathered up with Trumper’s Violet cream on a Vulfix #2234 brush, loaded a fresh Swedish Gillette blade into my 1940s Gillette Super Speed DE, and got one of those easy, comfortable, perfectly close shaves that this rig tosses off so nonchalantly.

I swear, this razor has completely up-ended my views on wetshaving. Whereas a year ago I was cranking my Merkur adjustables all the way up for the most aggressive shave possible from these beasts (and beating my face up), now I’m getting consistently closer shaves from a little old Gillette non-adjustable that looks like it’s barely showing blade.

Today I went back to using a stock Schick blade in my Injector, as an experiment. I wanted to see if the Feather disposable straight razor blades I’ve been getting such amazing shaves with for the past several weeks really were so much better than the standard blades this razor takes, or whether the improvement I was seeing was simply due to becoming more adept at shaving with the Injector after using a DE for so long.

So rather than replace the expired Feather Pro Super blade in my razor with another one, I chunked in a stock Schick from a new 7-pack. It was a pleasure to simply chunk a blade into the Injector from the blade magazine instead of clipping one of the Feathers, manually inserting it into the Schick magazine, and then fiddling with the magazine and razor till the Feather slid into the Injector and locked into place. Not that I mind going through this rigmarole every week if it means world-class, straight razor quality shaves every day, but it sure is nice just chunking a Schick blade into the Injector like the good Colonel intended.

Now, I never had a problem with the stock Schick blades at all. From the very first shave, they delivered a closer and more comfortable cut than any DE rig I’ve ever shaved with, and the Schick blades are plenty smooth and forgiving despite the seriously close shave.

It’s just that when I tried AndySam’s trick of modifying a Feather disposable straight razor blade (first a Pro Guard, then a Professional Super), the shaves suddenly shot up to the moon and resembled nothing so much as a professional straight razor shave.

The thought’s been nagging me that maybe I just became more comfortable with the Injector as time went on, and it wasn’t really the Feather blades after all. Maybe if I put a Schick blade back in, I’d get just as good a shave as with the Feathers.

Along with the Schick-loaded Injector, I used Taylor’s Lemon&Lime shaving cream with my Vulfix #2235 badger brush, and for pre-shave prep I had to sub mowing and edging my lawn (the ultimate shave?) in the hot August sun for climbing a machine to nowhere at the Y and sharing a schvitz with a naked guy who looked like Hall of Fame wide receiver James Lofton doing situps in the steam room like I did yesterday.

The all-Schick shave was nice and close — these blades are really excellent, and sharp as the day is long. But I have to say that the Schick didn’t glide quite as smoothly over my skin as the Feather Pro Super blade. And where one stroke of the Feather would’ve been all that was needed over a given patch of skin, the Schick needed a few extra passes to get everything.

Mainly, though, the shave itself wasn’t quite as awe-inspiring as it’s been with the Feather blades. It was closer than what I can achieve with any DE loaded with any blade, but now that I’ve been spoiled by straight razor quality shaves every day with the Feather/Injector combo, anything short of this paradigm is, I have to admit, a let-down.

I could happily live with the Schick blades and never complain about them. After shaving with a DE, the Schick blades were a revelation — along with the Injector razor, they give me a shave that’s closer, more comfortable, and far easier than anything I was ever able to get from even my best Merkur. I’ll keep buying Schick blades as long as they keep making them, because they’re excellent, excellent blades. Perfect for my dop kit when I travel.

That said, as long as I’ve got fresh Feather Pro Super blades (or the Pro Guards, which shave nearly as well) on hand, that’s what I plan on using in all my Injectors. It wasn’t my improved technique after all — I don’t know that you can improve your technique with an Injector. You just pick it up and shave with it. It’s the most geek-free shavegeek razor I’ve come across yet. But when you fit a Feather disposable straight razor blade into it, that’s when the magic happens.

I’m officially done yoinking vintage Injectors on eBay.

I do this every time I find something old that kicks ass — I go just a little nuts, rounding up backups for the object of my desire, then backups for the backups, then different colored backups, then backups for the different colored backups, until I’ve got several dozen of said object when I really only need one.

I’ve got a drawer full of vintage Gillette adjustable DE razors I hoarded once I tried this razor and fell in love with it. I still do — not only is a great shaver, but it’s probably the single coolest razor of them all. So naturally I had to score two or three dozen of them — hey, you never know, and they haven’t made these for decades. Maybe I’ll put the kids through Harvard when I sell these at Sotheby’s another decade from now. I saw that Metallica documentary where Lars sold off his entire art collection for 20mil, and it was all crap. I figure three dozen clean Gillette adjustables ought to bring in a nice, sweet haul.

And now I’ve gone and done it with Injectors. I won my first one on eBay a few weeks ago, and it gave me such an amazing shave, even with stock Schick blades, that I started buying up every decent Injector I could find, on eBay, in antique stores, anywhere.

Before I knew it, I was awash in Schicks, Eversharps, and a bunch of really zany unusable razors that came in some lots of razors I had to bid on to get at the Injectors. Any masochists out there want an old Gem razor that takes box-cutter blades? How ’bout a rusty Flicker that still has, I kid you not, vintage pubes crusted to the blade? Maybe it was Marilyn Monroe’s, or Bea Arthur’s? Any “Maude” fans out there? Make me an offer!

I cleaned up these old Injectors the best I could — first I gave ‘em a serious scrubbing with a Radius toothbrush and liberal amounts of Bartender’s Friend (no, not a sawed-off under the bar, but rather, the abrasive cleanser), and then I boiled the bejesus out of ‘em for half an hour or so till they were cleaner than the day they shaved their first puss.

I’m telling you, these old Eversharps with the bakelite handles and gold-plated brass heads are tough little buggers! You can boil the hell out of them and they come out looking perfect — the later 70s and 80s Injectors with the plastic handles can’t go near boiling water or they melt (I learned this the hard way, sorta melting the handle on one of these:

— it still shaves perfectly fine, but it looks a little Dali-esque now — say, didn’t Dali date Bea Arthur at one point? Anyone want a matched set? They’re priced to move!)

One thing I’ve noticed about these bakelite Eversharps is that even though they all look exactly alike, some shave a lot better than others. Eyeballing the safety bar and the razor gap, they all look nuts on, yet some of the bakelites don’t seem to get all the whiskers while others shave like a dream no matter what blade you feed them. It’s not that some of these dogs won’t hunt — the worst Eversharp I’ve got can still give a decent shave, but the best ones in my stable are truly God’s razors, capable of straight razor quality shaves with embarrassingly little effort.

Today I picked the best Eversharp of the litter — a saucy, orange-handled number I named “Brenda Starr”, and fed it a new Feather Pro Super blade I’d clipped down to size. I lathered up with Taylor’s rose cream and a Vulfix #2235 badger brush, and proceeded to get the very closest and most amazing shave I’ve given myself to date. Honestly, it was stupefying. I even back off a lot on the downward pressure, because these scary-sharp Feather blades are at their most terrifying when brand spanking new, but damned if I didn’t get the best shave I’ve ever give myself.

It felt just like that mythical straight razor shave I got at Truefitt & Hill’s (Dovo Shavette with a Personna blade, Pacific Shaving Oil, T&H hot lather from a Campbell Lather-King, lotsa hot towels and painstaking skin stretching by the master barber who wielded the blade, and T&H aftershave balm to finish), except my neck wasn’t red with irritation afterward.

I kept stroking my face all day, faceturbating right in front of my wife, kids, and my mother-in-law, because I couldn’t quite believe how close my shave was. I’m rubbing my face right now, ten hours later, and it still feels freshly shaven (Shaved? Shuven?). Amazing.

But that’s it. No more eBay Injectors. After the auctions I’m already watching are done, I mean. Starting……….now. Oh, there’s an adjustable and I don’t have one of those yet. Okay, starting……now!

Wait! Some guy misspelled schick, injector, razor, and the words “no” and “reserve”. Art, is that you? Okay, last one and then that’s it.

I am officially out of the Injector bidding game, starting………

One of the ironies of the online shavegeek community is that the most influential and widely-respected expert on the shaving forums happens to use a type of razor which almost nobody else has ever seen in person, much less tried shaving with.

While the double-edge safety razor is the de facto totem of shavegeek obsession, and the straight razor remains the weapon of choice for the die-hard traditionalists at the upper strata of the shavegeek elite, Gordon (like Cher and Bono, a one-namer) has long sung the praises of the Schick Injector.

In 1921, Col. Jacob Schick patterned his “Magazine Repeating Razor” after the repeating rifles the Army used. Unlike the existing Gillette safety razor which used loose DE blades, Schick’s new razor had a unique method of loading the disposable blades — an “injector” clip like a rifle’s, which automatically removed the old blade and inserted the new one, without the user having to touch the blades by hand.

Schick sold his company in 1928 to American Chain and Cable, and the new owners refined the razor’s design and introduced what we now know as the Schick Injector in 1935. Like the standard Gillette DE razor, one of the hallmarks of the Injector is that even the earliest 1935 versions work perfectly with today’s blades, and if you can hunt down some vintage Injector blades, they’ll drop right into a modern Injector razor, which was reportedly still being made, for the Japanese market only, as recently as a few years ago.

The Injector is different from the traditional DE razor in that it only has one cutting edge — in this respect, the Injector can be thought of as the forerunner to modern razors like the Mach3 et al. But the Injector’s lone blade , thicker than a DE’s and more like a mini straight razor, places it squarely in the old-school shaving camp.

Which brings me back to Gordon. There’s no one else on the shavegeek boards from whom I’ve learned more about how to shave properly and what products are most worth checking out, but the one bit of Gordoniana I never got around to was the Injector. Gordon’s been banging the drum for the Injector ever since I first started checking out the late, lamented Wetshavers board, but I never felt the urge to hunt one of these razors down, mainly because I’d just picked up a DE for the first time and was coming to terms with that whole thing.

But even as I figured out how to get good shaves out of the DE, I kept reading Gordon’s comments about his Injector, and how it was the main razor he used, despite owning several vintage Gillette and modern Merkur DEs. So I finally went on eBay and scored one last week, and today was my first shave with it.

Luckily, Injector blades are easy as pie to come by — I bought some brand new Schick Chromium Injector blades from drugstore.com for $4.89 for a pack of seven– hell, I could’ve ordered them from Amazon if I’d wanted to! Amazing that you can buy these blades so easily from such mainstream online vendors. All of my local drugstores sell Personna Injector blades under their own house brands, but Gordon doesn’t recommend them as highly as the Schicks due to their plastic case, which he says is more troublesome to deal with than the metal case of the Schick blades.

The Injector I scored looks exactly like the one pictured above, and dates to the 1940s. It’s quite a bit lighter and smaller than the heavy metal Merkur HD safety razor I favor, and looks considerably more antiquated. If Gordon hadn’t been praising the Injector all this time, I never would’ve picked this thing up. It looks like some turn-of-the-century bit of crude metalwork, like those mechanical piggy banks with the little tin dog wearing a clown’s hat that jumps through a little tin hoop accompanied by a loud grinding sound when you drop a coin in the slot.

Loading a blade couldn’t be easier with the Injector — you just insert the tab into the side of the razor, slide the tab across the clip, and the fresh blade eases right into place. If you had a used blade in the Injector, the tab automatically pushes it out of the razor as the new blade takes its place. Worked like a charm the very first time I tried it, with a newly-manufactured Schick clip and a vintage razor made around the time of WWII.

And the shave? See, here’s where it gets tricky. I’ll cut to the chase here — the Injector shaves like a freakin’ dream. I got such a wicked close, comfortable with it, on my very first try, that it’s almost 11PM and my face still looks and feels freshly shaven. It’s uncanny.

But that’s not the whole story. See, the Injector shaves so well, and so easily, that it almost takes the fun out of the wetshaving ritual. For someone who came of shaving age in the era of the disposable razor and then the multi-blade cartridge systems like Gillette’s Sensor and Mach3, the blade/handle geometry and the one-sided cutting edge are so much more familiar than the traditional DE razor and especially the cut throat. It took me weeks, months even, before I really became comfortable and adept with a DE, but it took me just five seconds to grok the Injector and get a fantastically good shave with it.

From time to time I read comments on the shavegeek boards from pinheads who complain that they can’t get a decent shave from an Injector. Listen, anyone who says he can’t get a good shave from an Injector doesn’t want to get a good shave from an Injector, because they want to stay true to the DE “cause” or whatever. The Injector is the easiest razor to get a superlative shave with I’ve ever come across.

And therein lies the problem. It’s easy. Maybe too easy. Unlike the DE, which even now requires my constant focus on what I’m doing, as well as a command of several other factors at all times, the Injector just shaves you. It mows down the whiskers like nobody’s business but it doesn’t feel like it’s doing much of anything, until you rub your face and it’s scary smooth.

If a straight razor is so cool because of its inherent difficulty and hence conferred He-Man status to those who master it (not me, not yet, maybe not ever), the Injector is its polar opposite. It’s so easy and so intuitive for anyone who’s ever used a modern disposable or cartridge razor that there really isn’t a learning curve to speak of at all. And if there’s no learning curve, there’s no mystique, which means no cult of geekly obsession. Just guys like Gordon who get great shaves, no big whoop.

So I don’t know what to do with this Injector. Frankly, I’m kind of disappointed that it worked so well the first time out of the chute. I was kind of hoping for another interesting learning curve, quite honestly, if for no other reason than to generate some usable blogfodder for you people. But that’s not going to happen. This thing works great, and I got a shave today as good as any of my super YMCA shaves (I did use some Nioxin hair conditioner on my face in the shower today, to soften my whiskers in lieu of workout sweat, and I lathered up with Taylor’s rose cream and my usual Vulfix silvertip #2235 brush) without even half trying.

I’m going to try this razor for a week, to see how I like it long-term compared to a DE. So far, it’s faster, easier, and less fun, and the shave is all that I ever wanted from a shave — exfoliatingly close, irritation-free, and no-brainer to the point that I could probably shave with my eyes closed if I wanted to.

Gordon was right. Again.