Tag Archives: Thoughts while shaving

Seventy four years ago today…

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From the Home Front Leadership
Our fight is crowned with victory
Norway is again free
Our minds are filled with joy, our hearts of gratitude toward those who fell in battle and towards all who were struggling to win the victory.
The enemy has now surrendered, and soon we will again fully be in control of our country. But remember: Capitulation is not the same as peace. The enemy still has weapons.
Let us in the midst of celebration preserve peace, dignity and discipline. Do not provoke the beaten enemy, and do not take the law into your own hands.
The duties of war are completed, the duties of peace await. They demand that we put everything in place to restore our democracy and rule of law.
The peace we have now won shall commit us as strongly as the war and the necessity tied our will to the fatherland’s cause. Together we will rebuild the country as a better, happier home for everyone.
God bless our precious fatherland!

 May 8th. Victory Europe Day, and the Norwegian Liberation day… when five years of occupation (more or less, depending on where in Norway you were) ended.

Some titbits from the liberation:

  • On May 8th, Norwegian Resistance units quickly and peacefully took control of administrative centres, radio stations and transport hubs.
  • The German forces were – with a few exception – were happy to give up, and were put in “house arrest” until POW-camps could be organised.
  • On May 9th and 10th Norwegian “police troops”* trained in Sweden arrived in selected Norwegain cities to assist taking control over the large mass of German prisoners.
  • The first allied forces started arriving by air on the 10th as well, including a fair number of intelligence specialists to take control of any advanced German military equipment.
  • On May 14th enough of the government in exile had returned for the resistance to officially hand over the governing of the country back to the elected officials.
  • On June 7th King Haakon VII returned to Norway, five years to the day after he went into exile rather than surrender.
Major Josef Nichterlain (centre) and his aide-deecamp hauptmann Hammel (right) surrenders Akershus Fortess – the location of main German military head quarter in Oslo – to 2. Lt Terje Rollem (left) of the Norwegian Resistance in accordance with the German instrument of surrender. Legend has it that Nichterlain felt disrespected and insulted by having to surrender to low ranking officer who were not in uniform, and didn’t carry rank insignia.

*) To avoid breaking Swedish neutrality, the Swedes could not train Norwegian military personnel… however, they could train a “police reserve” to help preserve peace in Norway – and since there were “foreign elements” in Norway that might “resist the police”, such a police force must be trained and equipped with the necessary equipment; i.e.: infantry small arms, anti-tank artillery, anti-aircraft artillery, mines, radios, etc… Had the war continued, there would even have been a unit of “police paratroopers” fully trained.

A 1957 Gillette Toggle advertisement

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As a point of reference, 10$ in 1957 is about 91$ today when inflation is taken into account. Not too bad considering the complexity of the design.

Black and white shaving in colour?

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There is a lot of old black and white photos of people shaving out there, photos that give us some idea of what shaving was like back then but which could tell us so much more more if they were in colour.

Enter colourise.sg – a deep learning colouriser prototype for old photos. Old Singaporean photos specifically, which may explain some of the odd colour choices…

I don’t believe the american dough-boys of the Great War wore blue uniforms, but overall not a bad effort.

German uniforms during the Great War were – at least when issued – feldgrau; a light grey-green, though there were variations of the shade ranging from greys to browns. Even with the blue-tinted uniforms and green sandbags, the recoloured image have a lot more life to it.

In this image from the Vietnam War, there is still a blue tint to the flak vest, although the rest of the fatigues are much closer to real life. The sandbags are a natural brown, and the lather looks white and inviting.

Or how about a nice straight razor shave, taken from the book Shaving Made Easy? There isn’t much for the software to take clues from in this image, but it still do a pretty good job making the shave looks like a faded colour photo.

Now this is the way to have your daily shaves… the colouriser have made a good one of this one, probably due to all the available clues in the photo.

How about an old fashioned barbershop? A few artefacts from the software, but the shave looks so much more inviting in colours.

Wrapping up with a still frame from The Great Dictator, one of Charlie Chaplin’s bests films. The shave scene was filmed in one go, and is well worth finding and watching.

While not perfect, I enjoyed coming a little closer to what shaves looked like back then… check it out for yourself if you got a favourite image you want to see re-colourised.

Seven Samurais – a once in a lifetime brush

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BullGoose and Paladin Shaving are collaborating on a series of brushes that honours both the tenth anniversary of BullGoose and the seventh anniversary of the Shave Nook forum. Ten each of seven different handles, topped with a specially selected gel tip knot. Read all about them in this thread on the Shave Nook.

Solid Shaves YouTube channel

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I don’t watch a lot of shaving videos on YouTube – a disturbing amount of them are rambling, barely edited cell phone videos with no obvious script or direction.

I have however kept an eye on a newcomer to YouTube the last month or so; Solid Shaves. He showcases some interesting shave gear I haven’t seen elsewhere, such as razors and soaps he gotten in Poland.

His channel introduction is short and sweet too…

So far he haven’t a lot of videos up, so you can easily look through most of his backlog and make up your own mind.

Oh, and he’s a ‘wege like me. I’m sure that has nothing to do with why I started watching his videos in the first place…

King of them all – things we can learn from old advertisement

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King of them all! …well, possible ahead of the pack early last century at least.

An advertisement from 2 September 1905 that I stumbled over at Wikimedia that peeked my interest.

While I do doubt the claim of 20-40 shaves per blade, it could be that the thicker carbon-steel blades kept their edges longer than the thinner stainless steel blades we use in this day and age. Or might people have coaxed that many shaves out of them due to the cost of replacement, much like many people today pushes as many shaves as they can out of cartridges before shelling out for new ones?

Taking inflation into account, the set of a razor with a dozen blades would set you back 146$ today – a not insignificant investment. A replacement pack of twelve blades would cost just shy of 30$… which is definitely in the same league as replacement cartridges today. If I paid 2.50$ per blade, I would try to coax a month of shaves out of it too.

In a way it makes sense that Gillette would charge as much for blades back then as they do for carts today. The safety razor wasn’t about liberating men from the tyranny of the barbershop, or helping the working stiff save money… it was about creating a market with vendor lock in and a steady revenue stream. People invest in a razor, and will return year after year to buy blades… and as long as you control the patents, you have in effect a walled garden. Other manufacturers can’t step in to offer compatible blades cheaper without infringing on your patent, and the users can’t get out without giving up on the money they have invested so far (the sunk cost fallacy).

Shaving with an old fashioned safety razor might save you money compared to the alternatives today, but when the old fashioned was the cutting edge, you paid to be part of the first adopters.

The cost of shaving over a quarter century

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I was pondering over my morning coffee today how much shaving really costs us… or could have cost us, if we didn’t go all in buying all those razors, brushes, soaps, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And all those et ceteras do add up.

Consider a spherical cow in vacuum… actually, no.

Consider a hypothetical scenario where the software – that is the pre-shave, the lather, and the post-shave – is identical, but we’ll consider different hardware – razor and blade / cartridge. In other words; I’ll only look at the cost of razor + cutting edge.

The Gillette Sensor I got as a promotion in boot camp lasted about 25 years of somewhat infrequent use before breaking. That should make a good baseline as a lifespan of a razor (even if at least one of my razors is a century old and still shaves great).

For the “cheap and nasty route”, Amazon charges roughly 13USD for a Gillette Fusion5 ProGlide Power Men’s Razor Handle (quite the mouthful to say) and 34USD for a pack of 12 refills. Gillette suggests that a cartridge lasts “up to” a month of shaving, so a 12 pack should last a year. The total cost of the handle and 25×12 cartridges at Amazon (which is cheap compared to buying in brick and mortar stores) is 863USD.

Looking over at BullGoose Shaving, a mid-range razor like the Muhle R41 Twist Safety Razor will set you back 75USD. He sells one of my favourite blades – the Green Astra – in packs of one hundred for a reasonable 15USD. In my experience, blades lasts for about a week, so a pack will lasts a little under two years – or 13 packs for the projected 25 years. Doing the math, we’ll find that going this route will costs a total of 270USD.

Or in a more visual format:

The break even point seems to be around two years and five months – 2,3665 years, which works out to roughly two years, four months, and twelve days – so if you plan to shave for more than two and a half year into the future, it pays to switch to DE once you used up any carts you already have bought.

Caveats: Amazon is as mentioned usually cheaper than buying from a physical store. You can get less expensive traditional safety razors, as well as significantly more expensive ones. I picked the R41 as an example of a mid-range model.

Again; this ONLY looks at the cost of shaving with a single razor and using the same blade, and assumes that you’ll use the same software regardless.

Old soldiers never die

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My Gillette Old Type from my vintage Khaki Kit still gives great shaves a hundred and one year after he was born – try that with a cartridge razor…

Seven years and counting

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I posted the very first post on this blog seven years ago today… it’s been fun, and as long as it keeps being fun I’ll keep at it. Thanks to all my readers, both my regulars and those who swing my now and then. I couldn’t done this without your interest in the fine art of wet shaving.

One of my favourite parts of writing this blog is when I got the time to deep dive into old patents and odd shaving gear and accessories – what I call Shaving Oddities – and I gathered all (or at least most) of those in a single page. If you have the time and inclination I suggest looking over them; there is quite a bit to learn and a fair number of chuckles to be had there.

I’ve also attempted to collect all of my reviews on a single page… I probably missed out a few here and there.

So again, to all my readers, thank you all for coming by and thank you all for inspiring me to keep having fun writing this blog.

How things change

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From “Shaving Made Easy”, a book printed in 1905:

THE SAFETY RAZOR.
Of recent years a great number of safety razors have been invented and placed on the market, the manufacturers of each claiming that theirs are superior to all others and that they have at last produced a razor that is destined to revolutionize shaving.
One thing may be said of safety razors in general—that if a man uses one he is less likely to cut himself, but this is all that can reasonably be said in their favor. Of course, if it were impossible to shave with the ordinary razor without cutting one’s self, then the safety razor would become a necessity. The truth is, however, that anyone who has a good keen smooth-cutting razor, lathers the face thoroughly, and will learn—if he does not already know—how to handle the razor properly, will run almost no danger. Such a man will seldom cut himself.
On the other hand, most of the safety razors are difficult to keep clean and dry, and therefore free from rust; and owing to the difficulty of stropping them, it is almost, if not quite impossible to keep them sharp. It is also difficult to make the correct stroke with them. Probably a hundred thousand safety razors have been sold in the United States within the past few years and it is extremely doubtful if ten per cent. of them are now in use.

The Gillette Safety Razor with disposable blades were first marketed in 1903, and made stropping of blades obsolete in safety razors. The rest is – as they say – history.