Sometimes I find a razor online I’ve never heard about before. Like the Larkin Buffalo Safety Razor, which seems to be manufactured for the Larking Company – the people behind the Larkin Idea which I’ve mentioned before.

Reminiscent of razors like the Curbo, the Diamond Edge, and the Shrp-Shavr, the Larkin Buffalo is a simple and cheap single edge razor. My first exposure was when I stumbled over the instruction manual for the razor on archive.org. And once my interest was piqued, I decided to dig deeper.

A Christy made hoe razor based on his 1905-07 patents, the Buffalo Safety Razor barely warrants a mention in the Waits’ Compendium. The manual makes for interesting reading though. And since this is a rebranded Christy, the manual can be used for any Christy or Christy-derived razor too.

The Buffalo Safety Razor seems like a decent, straight forward safety razor. Nothing too fancy, but not quite as bare-bones as the Curbo. Inserting and extracting the blade sounds a little daunting at first, but the Christy style blades had ears on each side to make it easier. The manual claims that the blade should be good for a week’s worth of shaves. And as it implies, blades were not to be thrown away – they could be honed and stropped.

As far as I know, replacement blades for Christy style razors were sold until the end of the 1920s. Once the supply of blades dried up, razors like the Buffalo Safety Razor quickly ended up in the landfill. And that is a shame, since so much shaving history went with them.