Men view shaving apparatus, unlike, say, power tools, with great detachment. I’ve yet to see anyone besides fuzzy-lipped teens stare desirously at the razor rack in my drugstore the way I catch boys of all ages gaping at anything with a blade or bit attached to a power cord when I go to the hardware store. This is because some men actually enjoy putting a circular saw to a 2-by-4, but not one likes to drag a sharp instrument across his face. And contrary to old TV ads, no man relishes the sadistic sting of Aqua Velva either. Pouring salt on all those wounds-because if it hurts, it must be good-is nuts. Still we do it, the whole shaving process. Grudgingly.
When the last blush of boyhood was nicked off our faces, shaving lost whatever romance it had, romance we associated with baseball heroes. It became, not a pleasure of manhood to look forward to, but another adult chore to dread. Rugged models rubbing their chins with manly vigor not withstanding, the expression most men see in the mirror each morning is an ever more mature version of the same expression we made as boys when confronted by the last day of summer break. There was no pleasure in going back to school, even if we knew it was good for us. And just as most boys spend their school days trying to make that necessary but unenjoyable duty tolerable, most men try to make shaving something more pleasurable than the daily ordeal it truly is.
But like the alternatives to attending grade school, the alternatives to shaving aren’t plentiful; if you don’t shave, you grow facial hair. All consideration to taste aside, mustaches and goatees are only partial solutions and, like full beards, entail as much maintenance as a clean-shaven face. To shave or not to shave: a real Hobson’s choice. But as if to deny this dilemma, invention after improvement after advancement have been thrust upon a gullible shaving public.
Here some history is in order. Straight razors date from the Bronze Age and have been little improved in the last 1,000 years. Even a 19th Century straight razor was hard to keep sharp, hard to use without inflicting harm and easier to master as a weapon than as a hygiene tool. To be called a “cutthroat” was a compliment in some circles, but only if the throat cut wasn’t one’s own. In these violent times, though, lazy thugs carry guns, not straight razors, and few men have the patience to shave with one either. A barbershop is still the best place to get a straight-razor shave-purportedly the closest of all shaves-but who has the spare time or money to waste on one? And who has the courage? Before the advent of modern dentistry it perhaps made sense that a man who could safely wield a straight razor could also extract teeth, but in this suspicious age of specialization, most men won’t entrust their face to a self-taught expert in minor surgery. So, whether it’s inconvenience, finance or fear motivating them, most men shave themselves.
The first technological leap from the straight razor was made when King Camp Gillette showed the world his safety razor in 1903. It was such a success that little changed over the next half-century. In that time, Schick sold the first electric shaver, and the argument could be made that it has been improved upon more since its invention than the straight razor has.
In 1921, Schick invented the Magazine Repeating Razor (inspired by the Army repeating rifle), a forerunner to its popular Injector razor, which came on the market in 1980. Wilkinson introduced stainless steel “Sword” blades in 1965, leaving one to wonder if the incidence of lockjaw declined. Though still available, a much more successful innovation, the Gillette Trac II twin blade, hit the market in 1971. More improvements followed: Gillette Atra pivoting head, 1977; Gillette Plus lubricated head, 1985; Gillette Sensor floating blades, 1990; Schick Tracer flexible head, 1991; Gillette Sensor Excel in 1994. The only other major change to handle-blade design altered shaver behavior more than the shave: 75 years after Gillette made a disposable blade, Bic made the whole razor disposable. These products were all touted as the zenith of shaving technology. (None, pity the ad people, were touted as the zenith of Madison Avenue hyperbole.)
I remember sitting in the bathtub as a boy, watching my father shave. When he finished, he would remove the blade and give me his disarmed safety razor and a dollop of shaving cream. I’d then do what he had done: lather up, contort my face and scrape off the foam. I’d blow out my cheek, tug up my nose, pull on my chin; yet never did I perform this facial dance with a blade in a safety razor until this year.
By the time puberty dusted my lip with a wispy moustache, safety razors were obsolete, so my beard was trained in the disposable age. I shaved with that proletarian tool for two years, until I tried a friend’s Norelco electric rotary shaver. Awed by gee-wizardry, I asked for one for Christmas, and Santa came riding over hill and dale just as he had in the commercials I had seen as a boy. It satisfied me while in college, until my beard thickened to a point where it could no longer be tamed by gadgetry. I went back to disposables. Six years later, I got a Braun foil-head electric shaver as another present. It shaved closer than the Norelco, though still not as close as a blade, but since my personal appearance was hardly an issue, I used it for the next few years. Then my work changed. Suddenly a 5 o’clock shadow before lunch became a problem of economics, not hygiene. I was by then married, and my wife, who instilled in me the virtues of recycling, persuaded me to buy a reusable razor. I purchased a Gillette Trac II and never gave shaving another thought, until . . .
On a recent trip, I was searching for my razor when I recalled that I had left it at my last stop. I went down to the hotel lobby, but the clerk could find every “In Case You Forgot Something” toiletry item, except for razors. He did, however, inform me of a nearby pharmacy. I walked to the store to buy a Trac II with blades and would have left in two minutes if I could have found what I was looking for. Instead, a quarter-hour later I was still staring dully at the shaving paraphernalia on display. I had never really seen it before, not since I was a shadow-lipped youth. I was so used to going to my usual store to buy my usual blades, without giving the shelf a second look, that I hadn’t noticed that shaving technology had proliferated faster than weapons technology during the Cold War. Half-asleep, trading breakfast for a shave, I was overwhelmed. Wow, I said to myself, ladies’ disposables come in pastel pink. But what most intrigued me was a safety razor, hanging with the Atras and Tracers looking all the world like a DC-3 surrounded by A320s and 747s. I had to buy it.
Be forewarned. A new safety razor blade is just slightly less dangerous than a chain saw. That hurried morning at the hotel, I made the mistake of shaving in the shower without a mirror, and I nicked my Adam’s apple and that little piece of flesh that divides the nostrils. Both wounds refused to stop bleeding, even after repeated applications of toilet paper patches, wet and dry. I still had to go through with my day’s business, though, and did so, looking as if I’d had a close brush with Sweeney Todd.
That was Friday. I went home, and by Sunday scabs had formed on my face that didn’t weep whenever I smiled or swallowed. On Monday I looked in the mirror; my beard was three days old. The morning shave would be tough. My home Trac II awaited me in the medicine chest, but when I saw my scabs, they challenged me.
“Go ahead,” they taunted, “try the safety razor again, but don’t blame us if we bleed like Mauna Loa spewing lava.” That was it. I’d been dared. It was now a matter of pride. Being unable to shave with a safety razor is like being unable to drive a stick shift. Both are obsolete skills, and a person can go his entire life without ever needing them, but they’re something a man is expected to know how to do. It’s a point of pride that I learned to drive on a manual shift, but that morning, I felt somehow inferior.
I took the safety razor-safety, ha!-from my travel kit and set it on the sink. I ran the hottest water my skin could tolerate, washed my face, rinsed, then lathered up. I spotted dried blood stuck to the blade and immediately spun the razor’s handle to open it. I slid a new, menacingly sharp blade from the pack into the razor and closed the clamshell top as if loading a missile silo. Then, with all the deliberateness of a bomb defuser, I set the razor to my face. I pulled it over my cheek; the big round steel head felt smooth on my skin as it glided through my whiskers. It might have been awkwardly balanced, but with this clumsiness came some bulk, heft absent in modern razors. When I found a comfortable grip, I liked how it felt in my hand. Pleasantly surprised, I continued, albeit very carefully. With great concentration, I avoided my healing wounds, and navigated a face that had become unfamiliar. Had I always had that bare patch on my jaw? Was that a new mole below my ear? And when did my chin whiskers turn so gray? For the duration of the shave, these and other questions begged response, though they all went unanswered. But after I rinsed, I felt something I’d never before felt after shaving: a sense of accomplishment.
Though I didn’t take strop to straight razor like my grandfather, I still felt as if I’d performed a task that took skill, that it was something a little special, something not every man did that morning. It had to be an event compared with the buzzing swatches, like so many passes over the lawn with a mower, some men drew across their faces with their electrics. And those slaves to fashion, men who drive sports cars with automatics, were deluding themselves if they thought the latest gimmick gave them that mythical closest, smoothest, most comfortable shave. But it was more than shaving chauvinism, because, lo and behold, my face was smooth. Really smooth. I feared leaving the bathroom because beautiful women in bikinis might mob me, the way they did Joe Namath, and beg me to “take it off, take it all off.” Yet that’s beside the point, too. What really matters is that I actually enjoyed the shave! I took such delight in it that I even subjected myself, willingly and gladly, to that companion masochistic ritual, slapping two palmfuls of after-shave on my face. It felt refreshing, and as the sting subsided, I wondered if maybe I didn’t enjoy grade school just a little. Rubbing my chin with masculine virility, I could hardly wait until the next morning when I’d have to shave again.
Perhaps finding joy in the morning shave is a little like getting a cheap thrill out of choosing socks, but I can’t help it. My mornings just haven’t been the same since I started shaving with a safety razor. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s not the razor at all. Maybe it’s something else. Maybe it has something to do with the tonic I now use, an archaic concoction called Bay Rum.
