I recently started shaving with a safety razor. 

For those unfamiliar with the term, a safety razor is an “old-school” metal razor with replaceable feather-light blades. 

Think of the type of razor your grandfather probably used – that’s the sort of razor I’m talking about.

I chose to start shaving with a safety razor for a number of reasons, quality of shave and cost of replacement blades being important factors.

imageThe reasons I chose to give the safety razor a try:

Cost of the blades.  The latest Gillette Mach-whatever or Schick blade cartridges run upwards of $2-3 apiece.  If you shave once per day, and need to use a new cartridge each day (like I do), this adds up to $60-$90 per month in replacement cartridges.  Contrast that with safety razor blades, which run about 15 cents apiece.

Quality of shave.  I never felt like I got a quality shave from today’s razor cartridges.  Sure, the first shave from the cartridge was pretty good on my face, but not so great on my neck area.  There, I’d get a lot of ingrown hairs and missed spots, owe to the bumpy landscape.  As far as the second shave with a commercial cartridge, forget about it.  I have a pretty heavy beard, and the second, third, and fourth shaves with the same cartridge always left a lot to be desired. I’ve written before about my attempts to extend the life of my razor blade cartridges, with varying results.  I think I extended the life of them a little using alcohol to dry them, but the second use was still never as good as the first.

Wanted to try something new.  OK, so it’s an old shaving technique, but it’s new to me.  Shaving is something I have to do everyday, I wanted to try making it more of an enjoyable experience than a chore.

I started doing a little research and found that there’s an whole active community of safety-razor shaving aficionados out there, and a wealth of freely available information on the topic. I’ve read a lot of it, and here are a few of the tidbits that stuck with me.

Today’s shaving is shaving dumbed down.  Companies like Gillette & Schick make their money by selling as many blades as they can.  As a result, the blades are geared toward the lowest common denominator. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – on the contrary, these blades perform pretty well for most people. I think it’s great that someone with little or no shaving experience can get a quick, safe, reasonable-quality shave using one of these blades.

Think of it like this: If you were buying a sports car, would you want a stick-shift or an automatic?  Sure, automatic transmissions are a fantastic invention, because they let people without manual transmission skills get from A to B.  But if you’re looking for top performance, learning to drive a manual transmission with pay dividends in the long run.

Today’s shaving is convenient, but isn’t necessarily good for your skin. Used to be that you had to spend a few minutes manually mixing up your shaving soap each morning. The soap provided an excellent shave, but it wasn’t exactly convenient. Then along came the aerosol containers, with their pre-made foam, saving a collective millions of man-hours each year. Fast, convenient, problem solved, right?  Not really. To make this ready-made foam, manufacturers have to add alcohols and aerosols that dry out your skin.  That’s why they all add aloe and artificial skin moisteners to their products – it’s to counteract the desiccating action of their creams and gels. 

With traditional  wet-shaving, if you take the time to mix your own soap, you don’t get any of these artificial skin-drying components. As a result, your skin will be more supple, more moisturized, less dry, however you want to put it.

Today’s multi-blade systems work by “lifting and cutting”, which can result in ingrown hairs.  We’ve all seen the commercials – the first blade lifts, the next blade cuts, providing you with a closer shave. It’s a brilliant piece of engineering, no?  For sure. The problem is that it results in the hair being cut off beneath the surface of the skin, which can cause ingrown hairs.  I used to always get little bumps on my neck after shaving with one of these blades for exactly this reason.  Today’s cartridges use this “lifting and cutting” method because it gives you a closer shave with only one pass, saving you the time of having to do a second or third pass.

Which brings me to some of the downsides of traditional wet shaving, here.