The people who write copy for advertisements must be – I feel – a special breed. Not only do they have to be able to twist the truth and lie with a smile, but if ordinary words don’t cut it, they have to come up with new words. Like this one; Stroned.
Stroned is – to paraphrase – a perfectly cromulent word. It means – we’re informed – to be both strapped and honed. And that, allegedly, set the 1949 Eversharp-Schick injector blade apart from all other razor blades. Stropped on thirty feet1 leather, they claimed to give more shaves per blade than any other blade. Made your face feels like a million dollar for only a penny a shave too…
Speaking of the cost; 75 cents netted the 1949 shaver twenty whole blades. So a bit of maths tells us that each blade was good for 3¾ shaves – round up to four. Which is less than an injector blade do today… I usually gets two weeks of shaving out of each injector blade.
Although… I’m not sure the injector blades are stroned any more, on 10 yards2 of leather.
The four biggest shaving nuisances is something they used in their advertisements for at least a decade. I’ve previously mentioned an ad from 1958 having the Four Nuisances as it’s main focus.
As a sidenote, the injector pictured in the advertisement looks like an G-model. The G was introduced in 1946, and I do enjoy my own G4 quite a lot. Enough that I’m buying a E2 from a fellow shaver over on the ShaveNook – so watch this space for my thoughts on that.
Stroned. Now how do I slip that into a sentence?
Footnotes:
- 9.144 meter for those of us who prefer Système international d’unités, or 0.0454545 furlongs for those who prefer the FFF-system
- 9.144×1010 Ångstrøm, for those who likes to annoy others with weird measures