A Better Way to Shave

One day several years ago while shopping with my wife, she reminded me that I had run out of cartridges for my razor. I had gotten one of those multi-blade razor handles in the mail a little while earlier and it came with two or three replaceable cartridges. I tried it and thought it shaved alright. Now I had to buy a pack of blades.

This is when I discovered that a pack of eight replacement cartridges for this thing was going to cost me more than $20.00. That's crazy. For that price, I should be able to mow my lawn with them. There was no way I was about to shell out that much money for a pack of razors. Even if a pack lasted me a month, That's still $240.00 in a year to shave, and that's not counting a can of foam a month for another five bucks a pop.

There had to be something better. I decided to use my lousy electric razor that I take on trips until I found an alternative.

On the way home from from the disappointing razor incident, my wife wanted to stop at an antique store. My wife believes that anything old is better than anything new, even if the old thing doesn't work. So we go to lots of antique stores.

In the antique store, I was poking through the cases and found an old straight razor. This thing looked dangerous. It was rusty, chipped, and had been sharpened down to nothing. But I knew it was the answer.

At a barber shop supply store I found what I was looking for. A brand new straight razor, shave soap and all the necessary extras. My wife looked skeptical, but she usually allows me to follow whatever current I happen to be floating on from one day to the next. Bless that woman.

I took all that gear home, sharpened my beautiful new razor up and shaved. All in all, I didn't do too bad, but over the course of the next few months, I learned some valuable lessons.

You can acquire a good straight razor from antique stores, ebay, or maybe a garage sale. A good new one can cost you $75 and up, but you can find a good used one for fifteen or twenty bucks. I bought a new Fromm when I started, and I think I paid around $90.00 for it. It's not the razor I would buy now, but it's good, and even though I now have thirty or so quality razors in my personal collection, I keep using my Fromm daily because I've grown attached to it.

Blades are generally ground in two ways. The more common hollow ground, and the less popular flat ground. Hollow ground blades have a concave surface area, making the cutting edge very thin and better to shave with. A flat ground blade is actually more wedge shaped, and is not preferred by most straight razor shavers. I actually tried shaving once with a flat ground razor, and I found it difficult to sharpen and not as effective to use. You may have a different experience, but I'll stick with a hollow ground, thank you. You'll know a hollow ground blade when you see it because the sides of the blade are curved, and the words "hollow ground" will often be stamped on the blade.

The initial investment in straight razor shaving will be more substantial than other methods, but in the long run you'll save money. To start, you'll need a razor, a cup, a brush, a leather strop, a cake of shave soap and a stone for sharpening. You can find all that stuff for less than $100.00 if you look around. Then all I spend is about four bucks on one of those little round cakes of shave soap every four or five months. Even if I buy three of them in a year, that's $12.00. If you use a pack of cartridges and a can of shaving cream every month for a year, you're spending approximately $300.00 versus my $12.00.

You'll need a stone and a strop. The stone is used for sharpening your razor, which you'll only need to do every few weeks. The strop, which is that strip of leather that you see hanging on your barber's counter, is used before and after each shave.

The first time I used a straight, I managed to shave without cutting myself at all. In the last few years, I have cut myself a few times, but I think I've probably sliced myself more with conventional razors than with a straight. Most importantly though, since I've started using a straight, I'm getting noticeably better shaves.

Also, if you're a fellow who has problems with shaving bumps, a straight razor should fix that. Unlike a cartridge razor, which carries your hair between blades and grinds them back into your skin causing a painful bump, straight razors have only one blade and allows your hair to be carried away from your face.

I want to be clear. It is not my intention to teach shaving technique. There are plenty of sites on the internet to teach you shaving technique, and it's really too much information to get into here. But if you think that straight razor shaving is for you, I encourage you to check it out.