Shaving in Full Circle

 Shaving in Full Circle

By Bobby Neal Winters

A few years ago I started shaving with oil instead of shaving cream. I liked the simplicity: You didn’t have to wipe it off afterwards. I liked the smell: cloves.

Word started coming back to me from some of my readers that you could shave with other things too, like hair conditioner, for example.  Just save those tiny little bottles every time you go to a motel and use them for shaving.  Or just steal some of your wife’s hair conditioner; you won’t use enough that she will ever miss it.

So I shaved my way through a variety of odd substances. It was a good time in which I didn’t spend any money on shaving cream.

It is now that I pause and note that this is just a little bit crazy. Shaving cream is not the big expense associated with shaving. The big expense comes with the disposable razors with the brand I used to use costing $2.40 apiece. To make the math come out even, say you get 6 shaves out of one. That’s $0.40 per shave.  Even if you are stealing hair conditioner to shave with, that’s expensive.

I’d gotten tired of that.  I decided that I wanted to “put it to the Man,” so I made a change.

Joe Scott, who runs the YouTube Channel, “Answers with Joe,” started advertising a “new” way to shave.  Actually, it’s a retro way to shave. It’s using something which used to be called (and now seems ironic) a “safety razor.”

There is a company which sells a slightly updated version of the safety razor which uses the old-fashioned single blades.

Men of my age will remember these.  They were what our fathers and grandfathers used.  

These men of my age will also remember the arms race involved when first they went to the two blades (there was a commercial with an animation showing the old-fashioned blade bend in-two), then to three, then to four, and, I believe, now to five. There was justification for every step. The first blade pulls it out; second cuts it off.  Then the reasoning became a bit less intuitive.  I suppose they took for granted that “more is better” would carry the day, and it did.

And, of course, the more blades, the more you pay.

Anyway, Joe Scott on YouTube was recommending this old-school solution and it appealed to me.

The company selling the old-school solution has a different business model.  It makes its money off the razor itself which costs $60 up front in a one-time expense.  Their razor differs from Dad’s razor in that it is designed to hold your blade at an angle to make it cut better.

In contrast to disposable razors, the blades cost $6 per hundred instead of $2.40 apiece.  I currently (remember that word) am getting about 5 shaves per blade, but let’s be conservative while making the math easier at the same time and say I get three shaves out of a blade. That would be about $0.02 per shave if nothing else changed. If.

I said I am currently getting 5 shaves per blade.  When I started using them, I was getting one or two.  That is still only three to six cents per shave, but something else was happening.  

You see there was another reason for the paradigm shift to the double, triple, quadruple, and (dear Lord) quintuple blades.  They don’t cut you as bad as the ironically named “safety razor.” 

In the beginning, shaving with hair conditioner, I was cutting the fool out of my face.  I was walking around with my face looking like a rare cut of steak some days.

Some men would’ve switched back to the multiple-bladed crimes against nature, but not me.  I’d suck $60 into my old-school solution, so nevertheless, I persisted.

Seeing my quandary, and knowing that she is married to an idiot, my dear wife suggested I start using shaving cream.

So I did.

The difference that made was almost immediate.

My shaves were much less bloody, and my blades started lasting longer.

My wife does the shopping so I don’t know what she paid for the generic can she bought me, but you can bet that it was less than the $1.80 per can that Barbasol gets. I believe that it’s safe to assume that one can will last for a month’s worth of shaves, so that is 6 cents per shave. 

With the 2 cents per shave I am spending on blades, that is a total of 8 cents per shave.  This means that I am saving $0.32 per shave.  I still have to account for the $60 I spend up front on the “specially designed” safety razor, but that will be paid for by the savings in 188 shaves.

Yes, growing a beard would’ve paid for it faster.  But being clean-shaven is the tradition of my people, so there.  

To summarize, through years of expense, experimentation, and blood, I am now shaving the way my grandfather did 100 years ago.

It’s progress, I guess.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )