A razor lost for a hundred years

Recently I found – and I’ve forgotten how I ended up there – a piece on restoring an old straight. Not just any old straight either; a straight lost at the Somme front during the Great War.

It is well worth a read by the way.

The restorer have some good points about the relative longevity of plastic razor cartridges versus old fashioned straights (and by extension safety razors); to paraphrase a cart lasts for a few shaves and lingers in nature forever, while an old fashion razor will shave forever yet will rust and decompose if lost or thrown away…

…and even a rusty, dinged up, buried for a century razor can still sometimes shave again!

How much for a blade?

Five cents in 1924?

Twenty-five cents in 1967?

Or just under five cents per blade (bottom left corner) in 1948?

For the record, for my preferred all-round blade I’ll happily pay about 13 cents each when buying in bulk… which is dirt cheap compared to what blades used to cost when adjusted for inflation.

Female armpit shaving – or “the art of body shaming the ladies”

Ever wonder why society as a whole expect the ladies to shave their pits?

It’s all down to body shaming – even if the term wasn’t invented back in 1915 when an advert appered in Harper’s Bazaar:

I found a short story over at the Metro about it, linking me to a short YouTube video… fairly informative if short.

So remember; guys started shaving because of wide spread military service during the Great War (and the requirement to use respirators), women started because society body shamed them into it….

OQMG No. 100-A – also known as US WW2 military issue soap

I have no idea how good or a bad a soap this might have been back in the day, but I am skeptical of a soap that claims to be useful for general toilet use, shaving, clothes laundering, and cleaning of mess kits and other equipment – as well as working in hard, soaps and salt water.
What I can tell, from the images I’ve found online, is that it came in two sizes; type 1 was 2 oz (57 grams) while type 2 was 4 oz (113 gram).