The Five Blade Razor
What a piece of work is man. We have used our genius to create weapons of enormous destruction, we have prolonged life to almost Methuselahian lengths, we have created works of art so devastatingly beautiful that you’ll want to gouge out your eyes so as not to taint retinal after-image, but all of this is as nothing compared to humanity’s greatest achievement, the five blade razor.
I have used Gillette razors ever since they sent me a (two blade) Sensor Excel razor on my 18th Birthday. I don’t particularly mind a bit of stubble and rarely shave more than 2 or 3 times a week, but when I do shave I like to luxuriate in the new-skin-smoothness of a wet shave.
When I was a poorer man, I tried out Lidl’s one-blade disposables, but it was a false economy and I ended up with a chin so lacerated I needed a bath towel to staunch the flow of blood. Gillette blades always seemed so expensive, so I would make mine last about 6 months each, to the point where they started to get rusty. When I finally forced myself to get some new Sensor Excel blades I discovered out that it was actually cheaper to buy a Mach3 instead.
Apart from the absence of rust, I couldn’t see much difference between the Sensor Excel and the Mach3 — I sneered at the marketing spiel and remained cynical as further improvements were announced in flashy commercials. I was reminded of the classic Onion spoof about a 5 blade razor, which highlighted ludicrousness of the razor-blade arms race:
The market? Listen, we make the market. All we have to do is put her out there with a little jingle. It’s as easy as, “Hey, shaving with anything less than five blades is like scraping your beard off with a dull hatchet.” Or “You’ll be so smooth, I could snort lines off of your chin.” Try “Your neck is going to be so friggin’ soft, someone’s gonna walk up and tie a goddamn Cub Scout kerchief under it.”
This satirical fantasy of five blades became reality with the Gillette Fusion, a razor that not only has five blades but also an aloe strip and a 6th blade on the other side of the razor for shaving awkward areas.
Last week I bought the Fusion, encouraged by a Superdrug promotion, and have subsequently had the best two shaves of my life. How did we live in those barbarous days of less than five blades? What savages we were!
People often complain that human ingenuity could be tasked to solving problems of greater importance than having a slightly smoother chin (and no doubt in a Gillette lab they are constructing a self-lathering seven-blade prototype with a hair dissolving membrane) but I would argue that civilization is built upon such small improvements. Civilization is not a utilitarian endeavour, civilization is built on vanity and excess.