Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Why did they uninvent the...


...single blade shaver? I’m talking about the human powered shaver, a.k.a. razor or safety razor, not electric shavers. They used to have one-blade safety razors in a reusable handle that was advertized as well-balanced. Balanced?! Are they afraid you’re gonna hoist it to your chin and stick it up your nose or maybe fall over into the sink? Ha! OK, I diverged into ranting about balance. Pretty soon in modern time this safety razor evolved into the plastic throw-away type that taxes our landfills, but still I’m diverging from my point. After a couple of years, the throw-away plastic shaver started appearing with two closely spaced blades for “closer shaves”. Not to be outdone, competitors came up with the three-blade model and now they are up to five blades or more. Not even one electron of a whisker extends above the skin line after the final swipe until a few seconds later when it has already grown out a micron’s length. STOP the blades! Haven’t they heard that it is now fashionable for the elegant sexy well-dressed man to have day-old to week-old stubble? The worse thing about all these multi-blades is that if you wait more than 24 hours between shaves, as fashionable and lazy men do, the whiskers jam between the blades and clog the stupid multi-blade shavers. You have to stop after every stroke and use your toothbrush to clean them out. OK, single-blade ones are not quite totally uninvented yet. I did manage to find one product at Target that is still single blade, the Bic 12-pack of single blade shavers. The package even says “Single blade for easy cleaning”. Go out and buy these.

1 comment:

James Douglass said...

I've tried the single blade ones. They are easy to clean, and they do seem to cut as close as the fancy kind. But I find I have to be a lot more careful with them not to cut my face, especially around the corners of my chin and under my nose. I don't know if that's true of all single blade razors, or if the single blade razors of the past were better built.