Razor: Parker 22R
Blade: Wilkinson Sword
Brush: Vie-Long #13051M
Lather: GzD Shavestick
Aftershave: Krampert’s Finest 80 Below
Additional Care: Alum Block & BullDog Original Beard Balm
I found an interesting 1934 advertisement for the GEM one-piece open comb Micromatic, highlighting some of the key selling points of the razor when compared to other and presumably inferior shaving utensils.
In addition to the offer of an gold plated Micromatic and an unspecified amount of blades for one dollar (about 20USD today), the advertisement tells us that a single quarter would get you a testing set of one non-gold razor, one single- and one double-edged1 blade. Pretty good value, and I suspect the 25 cent razor would last a long time too as long as you bought blades.
Razor: Parker 22R
Blade: Wilkinson Sword
Brush: Omega #10048
Lather: Palmolive Sensitive w/ aloe vera
Aftershave: Barber No3 Marmara
Additional Care: Alum Block & BullDog Original Beard Balm
Back in February I posted about a 1919 patent by Mr Joseph Kaufman of the American Safety Razor Corp, covering the invention of a shaving stick with a cocoa butter core. Today I learned two things; in 1919, the American Safety Razor Corp spun off a subsidiary by the name of Safetee Soap Corporation, and one of the first products offered by this subsidiary was – unsurprisingly – a shaving stick… with a cocoa butter core.
Reading the marketing wank lines up close to the patent description – although more verbose and less technical – as far as the cocoa butter goes:
You can see the beard-softening, skin-soothing core of pure cocoa-butter which runs from end to end…
…getting a beneficial cocoa-butter massage which soothes the skin like an added lotion.
Other features of the soap lines up less well with the patent; it’s round instead of square, it appears to be sold in a tin and not in a flexible sleeve -although there seems to be an inner cover on the soap in addition to the tin, the upper drawing seems to point to this being a metal foil.
So while I don’t think you can get a shaving stick like this today (unless an artisan feels inclined to make some that is) as I lamented in my previous post, you could in the early twenties for a mere thirty cents… and you could get a sample for the cost of a letter and ten cents in stamps.
Razor: Parker 22R
Blade: Wilkinson Sword
Brush: Semogue TSN LE 2012
Pre-Shave: The Lavish Gentleman Natural Strength Oil Cleanser
Lather: Asylum Shave Works Frankincense & Myrrh
Aftershave: Asylum Shave Works Frankincense & Myrrh
Additional Care: Alum Block, BullDog Beard Balm, & Pereira Shavery Boomerang Beard Comb
Razor: Gillette Single Ring
Blade: Feather Hi-Stainless
Brush: Brush Experimental Alpha
Lather: Mike’s Natural Soaps Orange, Cedarwood & Black Pepper
Tried shaving in the shower, as some guys swears to… for me it was more swearing at, but ended up with a two pass SAS.
Pores. We all have them and – at least according to this advertisement that was printed in Illustrated London News in 1899 – they are always open, just waiting for an impure particle to enter so it can mingle with the life-giving current of our blood and kill us… impure particles such as a lesser brand of shaving soap, since – allegedly – nothing comes closer to our skin than the lather we shave with.
FUD based advertisement at it’s finest… for starters, I’m not entirely convinced that you could force soap inside your pores with a brush unless you tried very hard – nor am I convinced that pores opens directly into the blood stream… unless a lot of the biology I learned in school was completely off the mark. The worst an impure soap can do is to give you horrible skin problems; clogged pores, acne, pimples, boils, and abscesses… some of which could – in the days before antibiotics and modern medicine – be fatal if left untreated. So I guess whoever wrote the advertisement had a point in that you should avoid soaps with questionable ingredients, even if the explanation is off the mark.
That said, one shilling for a shaving stick or luxury shaving tablet (and just half that – six pence – for an ‘American shaving tablet’) don’t sounds too bad – until you realised that adjusted for inflation it’s close to 6.50£ or 8.10$ – not expensive, but not cheap either.
Razor: Gillette Single Ring
Blade: Feather Hi-Stainless
Brush: Artesania Romera Manchurian Badger, imitation horn
Lather: Pereira Shavery Orange Blossom w/ activated charcoal
Aftershave: BullDog Sensitive Aftershave Balm
Additional Care: Alum Block & BullDog Original Beard Balm
Today’s patent isn’t all that unique, apart from being invented by the same gentleman whom patented the travel razor I looked at last Thursday. It is one of the recurring self-feeding or fountain shaving brushes – of which I’ve snarked on several before1 – and the claimed improvement was in the way it was made.
The principal object of the invention is to provide a simply constructed and efficiently operating device, which is sanitary in use, sightly in appearance and may be economical manufactured.
Christian E A Gronbech, US 1,1409,168
As can be seen from the drawing, the handle of the brush is hollow, with a threaded rod down the centre. The cap on the base of the handle is secured to the rod by means of a screw – allowing the rod to be turned – and a plunger or piston rides on the rod. A pair of longitudinal indentation – or ridges, if you prefer – is pressed into the sides of the handle (refer to figure 2 on the drawing) for the plunger to ride on as it’s screwed up and down.
The plunger itself is a sandwiched construction, consisting of two disks with a washer between them. While the patent text don’t specify, I suspect that the two disks (24) was meant to be metal while the washer was made of rubber – thus creating a seal against the sidewalls of the handle.
The knot sits in a base (15) which is secured to the handle by means of screw threads (12y), and can be removed by the user – has to be removed in fact, in order to refill soap paste. The base has a hole in the middle to allow soap paste to enter the brush.
As the cap is turned and the plunger pushes towards the knot, the soap paste in the handle is forced past openings (ducts and an axial bore) in the rod and into the knot, allowing the user to lather up and get shaving.
When the handle is empty of the soap paste, the user is meant to unscrew the knot, move the plunger all the way to the back of the handle by means of the cap, and refill the handle from a small tube screwed into a threaded hole under the knot – an air hole allowed for the air in the handle to be expelled during this operation.
Looking at the drawing, it’s obvious that most of the parts can be constructed by stamping sheet metal and off the shelf pieces (like the screw rod and screw), allowing for fast, inexpensive manufacture with minimal machining. The handle can even be a length of extruded aluminium if someone wants to make this today, and it don’t even have to be round as long as the plunger is a tight fit (if it’s not round you wouldn’t necessarily need the pair of ridges either).
Patented at about the same time as his handleless travel razors, Gronbech’s self feeding brush would have made a nice addition to the dopp bag since it would have done away with the need to carry a tube of soap separably. However it does suffer from the same fault as all self feeding shaving brushes I’ve seen so far; the soap is introduced to the base of the knot, not towards the tips where the lather is actually built.