A seasonal Schick advertisement from 1950 or 1951.
While the travel set and Twinjector looks nice, I must admit that the idea of 120 blades – Years Supply – is an oddly tempting gift to receive.
Schick makes Santa want to shave
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Tag Archives: Vintage
A Gift with a Purpose
An interesting angle on this one; using a safety razor would save you money! It might even been true in the days before Razor Acquisition Disorder…
The razors mentioned would peg this advertisement to the 1910’s, 1920’s, or thereabouts. One online resource – which didn’t mention sources – claims 1916 as the date. If that is correct, the claim of 40-50$ saved in a year equals about 950-1200$ today – not an insignificant amount by any stretch of the imagination.
What did you get for Christmas almost eleven years ago?
The use of customer reviews and letters of recommendation do – possible to the surprise of people who have grown up since online shopping became a huge thing – go back decades, if not centuries. During my meandering online wanderings I’ve found this example from a century ago.
As far as a little searching can tell me, Ralph V. Hinkle was no one special… not famous, at least not outside his immediate area. An Every-man, if you prefer that term, someone other customers could relate to.
There is off course the possibility of the letter being fake, written by the Rubberset marketing department, but would that be any different than today?
As an aside my oldest brush still in rotation is about a decade old too; an Omega 10048 – it shed a few hairs the first year or so, but is otherwise even better now than when I took it out of the box.
Are You a Friend of His?
Is this why there are so many vintage Gillettes in near mint condition? You don’t know what to get for your friend, so you buy him a razor… just as several other friends of him did. After all, the ad promises that it’ll be “the happiest hit of the all the gifts at Christmas”.
Guy ends up with half a dozen razors, sticks five in a drawer and uses just one…
Old advertisement – four biggest nuisances?
If old advertisements are to be believed, wetshavers in the Olden Days must bave been pretty easy to annoy…
According to this lovely Schick advertisement from 1958, the biggest shaving nuisances are having to touch the blade, having to take apart your razor, wasting time and irritated skin.
I can see the last one being a pain in the posterior, but the other three? Might be marketing desperately coming up with ways the injector outperforms the double edge, might be thin skinned shavers.
A couple of other take-aways; allegedly you can shave faster with an injector than any other razor – other ads from the period suggest up to five times as fast, but I would like to see the data supporting that assessment – and a brand new Schick with twenty blades costed the equivalent of eleven and a quarter US dollar.
As a sidenote the picture in the advertisement clearly shows a late G-type razor, a style that as far as I can find went out of production three years before the ad was printed. Reuse of existing graphical elements, or selling of the last of the old stock?
Shave of the day 25th November
Razor: Gillette Slim
Blade: Astra Green
Brush: Artesania Romera Manchurian Badger, imitation horn
Pre-Shave: The Lavish Gentleman Natural Strength Oil Cleanser
Lather: Pereira Shavery Orange Blossom w/ activated charcoal
Aftershave: Barber No3 Marmara
Additional Care: Alum Block, BullDog Original Beard Oil, & Pereira Shavery Boomerang Beard Comb
GEM razor Khaki Service Outfit
Everyone who have a modicum of interest in the history of wetshaving knows the Gillette Khaki Set from the Great War – there is even a very good modern version being offered by Spearhead Shaving Company – but how many today knows of the GEM Khaki Service Outfit? I didn’t until I started perusing vintage razor advertisements.
While the blades a doughboy got in the Gillette Khaki Set were for all intents and purposes disposable, the GEM Khaki Service Outfit came with a separate handle for stropping the seven blades it came with. So while the Gillette offered vendor lock-in and future costs, the GEM could arguable be seen as a one time investment – if you had a strop, that is.
Ask for the GEM at your dealer, or the Post Exchange, Camp Canteens, or Quarter-master’s Depot.
…however I fear that if you went to a US PX today they would be out of stock.I still want one though.
Henry J Gaisman’s patent for a folding injector razor
Imagine, if you will, an injector razor with the spare blades stored in the handle. Now imagine it in such a way that the head will swivel 90 degrees to line up with the spare blades. Got it? Good… that is basically what Henry J Gaisman patented in 1928.
The patent – which was granted in 1932, and assigned to Gillette Safety Razor Company – goes into quite a bit of details.
The numeral 1 indicates a blade holder, and at 2 is a handle shown provided with a reduced portion 2a to which the blade holder is pivotally attached. I have shown a screw 3 pivotally connecting the blade holder and the handle, whereby the blade holder may be turned .at an angle to the handle for shaving, (Fig. 1), and may be turned parallel to the handle to receive and discharge blades, (Figs. 4 and 5). The blade holder has a relatively flat seat 4 upon which the blade 5 may rest with its cutting ed es extending beyond the seat for shaving. Guards for the blade edge are indicated at 6, which guards are shown provided with comblike teeth at 6a in proper position relatively to the blade edges to guard the latter. The guards 6 are connected to the blade holder so as to have movement relatively to the corresponding blade edges, the guards being shown attached to the blade holder material by the connecting pieces 7, and due to resiliency of the meta …the guards may be adjusted toward and from the blade edges. I have illustrated screws 8 operative in threaded bores in the guards, adapted to be rotated against the body of the blade holder for adjusting the guards with respect to the blade edges, (Fig. 2). At 9 is a retainer for the blade to keep the latter pressed against the seat 4. The retainer is attached to the blade holder, as rivets or screws, at 9′, (Fig. 1) and is of resilient material so as to overlie the blade at the free edges 9a of the retainer, said edges being suitably spaced from the seat 4 of the holder to receive the blade in the space therebetween, pressure of the retainer upon the blade keeps the latter on its seat. The corners of the retainer are shown secured to posts 6b near the ends of the guards. To permit the blade to slide along the seat 4 of blade holder 1 and to retain the blade in shaving position I provide a plate 13 that is located between seat 4 and the adjacent end of 10@ handle 2, which plate is provided with tapering projections 14 that are adapted to pass through openings 1a in the blade holder at the seat 4 and t rough registering openings 5a in the blade, (Fig. 8).
Clear as mud, as most patent texts are…
Short version is that the head tilts back, so you can load it from the blade magazine in the handle. The spare blades are kept secure in said handle. Oh, and there is an open comb guard.
The whole package looks like it would make for a pretty neat travel razor, as it folds into a small package, and I can see something like this doing reasonable well today if it was set up to accept a standard injector blade.
Selecting the Shaving Outfit – 1905 vs 2019
The public domain book “Shaving made Easy” have a short chapter on selecting your shaving outfit. This is the original text and my annotations and comments:
First-class tools are necessary at the very outset. No matter how skillfully one may handle inferior tools, they will invariably produce poor results.
Probably as many failures have resulted from the use of poor razors, strops, or soap as from the lack of knowledge how to use them. In order that the best possible results may be attained, good tools and skill in using them should go hand in hand.
When I was young I was told repeatedly that good tools are half the work, and that holds true when it comes to tools for shaving as well. A poor razor or a bad lather will not give a good shave, no matter how well the tools are wielded. On the other hand, not even the best razor, the fanciest brush or the most exquisite shave soap will yield the desired result if not used with the necessary skill. Good tools and the skills to use them should still go hand in hand.
The shaving outfit should consist of one or two good razors, a first-class strop, a mirror, a cup, a brush, a cake of shaving soap, and a bottle of either bay rum, witch hazel, or some other good face lotion. These constitute what may be considered the necessary articles, and to these may be added a number of others, such as a good hone, magnesia or talcum powder, astringent or styptic pencils, antiseptic lotions, etc. which, while not absolutely requisite, will nevertheless add much to the convenience, comfort and luxury of the shave.
The shaving outfit recommended in 1905 would serve just as well today, although since the modern shaver is more likely to use a safety razor or even cartridge razor instead of a straight razor, I would recommend investing in a single good razor instead of two – at least until the desire to buy more raises its head. Using a safety razor also means that the modern razor will not have to worry about buying a strop and hone. The money saved can be invested in a second brush, or a small selection of soaps and post-shave products.
I’m wondering if I should commit a book…
…well… not a whole book per see, but an annotated and commented version of the classic “Shaving Made Easy – What the Man Who Shaves Ought to Know”.
The original is from 1905, and is still a decent read (link in the sidebar of my blog, if interested – or find a copy on Wikisource, archive.org or Project Gutenberg) but for obvious reasons don’t do much to cover some of the things a modern wetshaver needs to know.
I’m looking for either encouragement or discouragement… pros and cons.
If I do go ahead, finishing it will take time since it’ll be done in between everything else I have on my plate. I was thinking making it available for download, on Kindle and possible as a print on demand book.