Because we all know advertisements never lie to us, right? Right… ? Oh, they do, don’t they? Bummer…
Still; even if old fashioned shaving wont get you any more girls, you’ll get a better shave and a moment of zen in the morning. And two out of three ain’t bad, as Meat Loaf told us back when I was a wee kid.
…is WAY too excited about shaving cream. Only a select few artisan shaving soaps warrants this level of wide eyed excitement.
A hundred years ago a world fair – more properly known as the Panama-Pacific International Exposition – was held in San Francisco. And while the booth ladies most likely were an unknown*, the booth for Gillette was suitable pimped up.
*) Wish it was this way today as well… focus on the product, people.
“A good lather is half the shave”
I keep coming back to the free book Shaving Made Easy, since it’s both a fun read in it’s old fashioned way and I learn something new.
Today I was looking up what the author had to say about mirrors;
Position of the Mirror.
The mirror should hang between two windows if possible, so that when you look into it the light will fall directly upon both sides of your face. You will then be able to get a good reflection of either side. Remove the collar. To prevent soiling the shirt, place a towel around the neck in an easy, comfortable manner, pinning it at the side.
The importance of good light aside… remove the collar?
Turns out that a well dressed gentleman a century ago not just shaved in his shirt, but said shirt had a detachable collar like this one:
The upside was that the collar could be kept clean and well starched, which apparently was the Done Thing for a respectable gentleman at the time… so well starched in fact that the Norwegian (as well as Danish and German) term for a detachable collar was “Father murderer” – the idea being that the stiff edge could slit your throat if you turned your head around.
While we might still slit our throats with out razors, at least our shirts aren’t going to be the end of us these days…
Shaving made easy is a book from 1904 that I have mentioned before on my blog.. it’s an interesting read and it’s free (as in beer), so why not download it and give it a read? Even if it’s 110 years since the book was printed, the advice given is just as valid.
On my latest read through of it, I spotted the following sage advice:
If a man cuts himself while shaving, it is usually due to certain causes that are easily avoidable. The principal causes are six in number:
- First—Attempting to shave with a dull razor.
- Second—Using a sharp pointed razor.
- Third—Shaving with a razor that is too hollow ground, so that the edge springs and bends on the face.
- Fourth—Holding the razor improperly.
- Fifth—Shaving upward against the growth of the beard.
- Sixth—Shaving in too great a hurry.
If you will avoid these mistakes and exercise proper care, you will seldom cut yourself. But when you do, it will be well to know how to treat the wound. If it be slight, the bleeding may sometimes be checked by using pressure. Covering the fingers with a towel, simply press the cut together. If this does not stop the flow, use an astringent. The styptic pencils, made especially for this purpose, are the best, and may be obtained at any store where barbers’ supplies are kept. In case you should not have the pencils, alum may be used. In any event do not be discouraged, for such accidents sometimes happen to the best barbers.
I suspect the second and third reasons don’t quite apply to those of us using a DE or SE, but the other four holds true.
Yet another razor oddity I have dug up some information on, courtesy of a chance remark over on my favourite shave forum: the Shape Sharp Razor!
The basic idea is interesting, and ties into the razor blade sharpeners I blogged about last month: Keep your razor blades sharp, and keep them longer. Made a lot more sense of the old carbon blades than it do for modern stainless ones, since they cost more (relatively speaking) and dulled quicker.
At a glance, it looks like a SE razor with a wicked blade exposure and an oversized head… but there is a reason for that: the head contains a hone, and holds a regular DE blade. The idea is/was that the user shake the razor back and forth to keep the edge honed during shaving, thus having a perfectly honed blade at all time for the best possible shave… at least, that is what the pamphlet says.
According to the information I found online, the construction is a combination of cast zinc and stamped brass, and possibly steel – although I’ve also spotted references to Shake Sharps with bakelite handles.
Since only one edge was exposed at any given time, the shaver had to open the razor and flip the blade around when he wanted to use the second edge. If the honing feature worked – and I have no reason to believe otherwise after looking at the patents online – you would only have to do that after wearing one edge out completely.
When most men wants to remove unsightly hair, they reach for a razor and some foamy stuff… …women on the other hand seem to do horrible things to themselves, such as:
Honestly, I rather suffer shave bumps and cuts from using a cartridge than doing any of those things…
Ladies? Keep your hairy legs if you like – or get your Significant Other to whip up some lather and shave them for you – because those things you do to keep them smooth sounds horrifying!
Halfway continuing from my musings on how old razor shaved when new – that is, with the original specification blade – I have spent a little time looking at how to keep a carbon blade sharp. It turns out that back in the day there was a LOT of ingenuity put into how to make your precious blades ‘fresh’, which is more critical with carbon steel blades due to the process of micro-pitting.
We may consider blades to be cheap today, but they cost comparatively more back in the old days
While I don’t usually take claims made in advertisements at face value, two months is a lot longer than the one week I use a blade before throwing it out… but then, part of the reason I throw them out is that I like to change things up. If you’re into traditional wetshaving to save money on the other hand, a blade sharpener makes a bit more sense – save money where you can.
There were quite a few different models too, working on several different principles:
I been thinking again, and sometimes when I do that my brain gets stuck on questions I cant answer…
Given that the original Gillette blade was – among other differences – noticeable thicker and therefore more rigid than today’s blades, and that perceived blade aggressiveness is often linked to blade exposure and angle… would an old razor (like, say, a Gillette Old Type from 1918) shave and feel any different back then compared to these days?
King Gillette’s original patent do state the following:
The blade of my razors made of’ sheet steel having preferably a uniform thickness of about six one-thousandths of an inch.
Or in measures more easy to understand; 6/1000″ = 0.1524 mm.
A fair bit of digging online seems to indicate that modern blades are about 0.10 mm thick, or about 2/3rds as thick as the old blade – assuming, off course, that the original blade was as thick as the patent calls for. It’s hard to tell exactly when blades got thinner, but over on another forum I spotted one guy claiming that
[blades] became a lot thinner after that; I have seen blades from the 50’s and 60’s that went from 0.10 to 0.08 and even 0.06mm.
For all I know the increased thinness of the blades could have started sooner, the the modern shape and perforation of the DE blades seems to have appeared around 1930. Going by the patent numbers listed on a US Gillette Blue from 1935, it’s hard to tell… several references to “thin, flexible blade”, but nothing on just HOW thin it is.
When I raised this question on my favourite shave forum, the guy making my preferred aftershave pointed out that he likes SE razors due to their thicker, stiffer blades – which like DE blades used to be even thicker and therefore even stiffer – since they flexes less. I should probably get my callipers out to measure a new and old SE blade, just to see how pronounced the difference really is.
Stiffening of a blade can also be achieved by twisting it in a slant razor, and slants are often considered to be more “aggressive”… even if I personally don’t think my slants are aggressive, just efficient – perhaps aggressive is the wrong term, even if it’s commonly used to denote the opposite of a mild razor.
Making a number of wild assumptions, desperately pulling on what I learned in structural mechanics more than two decades ago, and hoping that this website have got their code right; the old blade ought to be twice as stiff as the current blades – with the biggest caveat being that the modulus of elasticity is the same for the steels used.
These guys offers three hole blades that are a dimensional match for the pre-1929 Gillette blade… and it seems that one of the thickness’s they offer match the old blades. But the blades are made for cutting plastic film, so they will probably be rotten for shaving with.
After all that searching and math, I still have no real idea how a blade twice as stiff would affect the behaviour of an Old Style Gillette… Combining what what we know about SE razors and their stiffer blades with what we know about the torsionally stiffened blades in slants, I’m leaning towards the idea that the Old Type Gillettes using the pre-1929 blades may have been more aggressive than they are with the thinner blades of today.
I may be wrong though, with all the assumptions and guestimates underpinning that idea.
