Many a good razor has been cast aside as useless…

Many a good razor has been cast aside as useless and good for nothing, till pro bono publico, a fact; or, proof positive. Step’d forward, to give ease to the cheek, comfort to the upper lip, a pleasant familiarity to the chin and an uncommon agreeable surprize to the bearded physiognomy which takes place by a razor being strop’d or sharpen’d on Packwood’s new invented razor strop…

Confess to the crime skeleton!

A spooky repost from two years ago.

After coming across a meme on the internet, I recently spend some time tracking down the patent for what I can only think of as the Crime Skeleton. It is a perfect example that the line between genius and insanity is blurry at best. I’m not quite sure which side of that line Helene Adalaide Shelby’s invention falls under, but I am inclined to go for “genius”. And a somewhat spooky and misguided genius at that.

So let’s take a short break from weird shaving patents and look at a plain weird patent.

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Shaving is saving

Shaving is saving, the advertisement promises, as long as the shaving is done with a Gillette. And in 1906 this might have been true… today? Buying the current offering from Gillette or the other big multinationals is a sure way to spend money – carts are expensive, when compared to the good old double edged blade.

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Late 1920s Chinese advertisement for Gillette blades

There are different things that gets my attention when I browse old razor and blade advertisements. Sometimes it is an interesting picture. Sometimes it is a razor that is unknown to me. Sometimes it is hilarious claims in the text.

And sometimes… it is the bright colour.

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Wooden disposables; the Welch’s Saratoga and the E-KON-I-ME

A repost from five years ago, for the entertainment of new readers.

When you think “disposable razor” today, you think plastic. But there was a time before non-biodegradable materials were the material of choice for things used a few times and then dumped in the landfill… and in those days a lady would want smooth legs and hairless pits even if she had forgotten her grooming equipment when she went on a unplanned rendezvous.

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A McDonald’s shave?

There is a few thing I think of when I hear McDonald. Most of them involves greasy junk food, apple pies filled with lava hot goop, and having to pay out large amounts of money for serving coffee that was way too warm in a container with an improperly secured lid to old ladies. The one thing that I don’t think about when I head McDonald is razors.

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You be the Judge – the Probak blade

As some of you might already know, the double edged blade we know and love today is not strictly speaking a Gillette invention. The whole Probak-Gillette story is complicated – as I’ve touched on six years ago and others have explained way better than me – but the long and the short is that AutoStrop Safety Razor (who owned the Probak brand) got ahead of Gillette Safety Razor Company in a patent war over slotted blades, and then negotiated a deal which saw them both being bought out by Gillette and taking over the Gillette board. As I said, it is complicated. But somewhere in the middle of it all, after the patents were filed but before Gaisman ended up in control of Gillette, Probak put out an advertisement suggesting that you – as a shaver – should be the judge of what blades were the better.

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Freaky wooden man selling razors

AutoStrop seems to have had some odd marketing going on in the early part of the last century, like the animated display we looked at two years ago. But even that is peanuts compared to the freaky wooden doll they advertised that they were using fore advertisements.

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