Post 28
Out of curiosity – actually it was more like spite – I wandered through the shaving section at Rite Aid while my wife was picking up some Burt’s Bees. While scoffing at the vestiges of my former facial life, my eye was caught by a product entirely new to me. I stooped to get a closer look. It’s a bit difficult to express exactly how I feel about this product, but I will give it the ol’ college try. Imagine the year is 1989. You’re at the Los Angeles Coliseum for a Motocross championship event. The roar of two-stroke engines is heard. The acrid smell of burning fossil fuel fills your nostrils as the plumes of its smoke does your lungs. You’re only eleven years old but you recognize the putrid smell of cheap beer as an overweight, middle-aged man in an orange mesh tank sloshes some onto the sleeve of your favorite Hobie long-sleeved T-shirt. Looking to the Coliseum floor you see a dozen or more motor vehicles racing to and fro at incredible speeds. Muscle. Strokes. Power. HORSEpower. Now imagine that coliseum floor were actually a head. That’s right. A gigantic human head about to be shaved. And each of those motor vehicles was dragging behind it a gigantic Mach 5 cartridge blade, mowing the grass of the motocross course ever closer to the level of the dirt. Now you have a shadow of the image that is, the “Headblade All Terrain Razor.” Just $15.95 at your local Rite Aid. Shave with RAGE.
Post 29
I just received three years worth of DE razor blades for what I used to pay for a single pack of cartridges. The shipper even threw in a single mint to sweeten the deal. Try getting THAT kind of service from Gillette!
Post 30
At this moment I have four cuts on my fingers. Actually, three are on fingers (Rt index, Rt middle, Rt thumb), one is on the knuckle next to the little finger on my left hand. In this way I am starting to think wet shaving is like learning to play the guitar. Your fingers hurt until they develop calluses. It’s kinds funny though; I won’t notice that I am cut until some point later in the day – eating a burrito, say. As soon as that Tapatio hits the fresh wound, oh Boy! do I know it’s there.
Post 31
With much interest I teed up the ISANA Men – next up in my continuing line of sampler pack blades (at this point I’m just over halfway through). Any product that says, “Made in Germany” already has a leg up on its competition in my book. As you probably know by now, my beloved car was made in Germany in the year 1967! But, unlike the incredibly consistent performance from vintage VW even after 47 years, the brand new Isana failed to impress. In fact, it was one of the worst shaves I’ve had out of the sampler pack thus far, second only to Treet Dura Sharp. I banked the blade after just one shave. No nicks, fortunately. It just didn’t cut the hair very well.
Post 32
I bought a new toy! Picked it at the local antique dealer. It’s a gold Gillette ball-end Tech, and it’s simply pristine. A very handsome razor. As soon as I got it home, I used a paste made of baking soda, Dr. Bronner’s, and tea tree oil and applied it with a toothbrush to clean the razor. It’s now gleaming like the day it came out of the factory back in 1957. I compared it to my 1955 Gillette Red Tip to realize that their heads are the exact same dimensions. The scalloped safety bar is exactly the same. The guard plates appear to be the exact same (minus the special modifications allowing for the Red Tip’s unique mechanics). Loading up my blade of choice, Rapira, I set about giving my new purchase a try. It’s a bit lighter in the hand than the Red Tip, though I think this may have more to do with its thinner handle. It’s a great shave! I think the thinness of the handle may have actually forced me to be more careful with my face. Which leads me to another thought I’ve been having regarding these thick-handled, heavy razors: shaving your face is not an extreme sport. Your face is delicate, and you only get one. I’ve seen some videos of guys shaving their face as if it’s the Motocross, and I just cringe. I mean, I get that there needs to be some heft to the blade to create the force needed to cut through hair; but honestly, how stiff must your beard be to require the force of a small automobile to cut through it?!?! That to say, I realized when I shaved with the Tech that I’ve been getting a little careless with the Red Tip. For that reason alone I am glad to have bought the Tech. It’s teaching me a lesson about shaving that I had slightly lost sight of after just seven months of wet shaving.
Post 33
Continued correspondence with Lynn Abrams regarding shaving with my straight razor. In response to my previous email on the topic (refer to Post #27), Lynn had intimated I was probably dulling the blade with my stropping technique (or lack thereof!). Here is my response to him:
I did have a bit of a breakthrough yesterday. What you said about the dulling I took to heart and went back to the tutorials on stropping only to realize that, while I’ve got the angle, flip, pull, etc. correct, I’ve definitely been applying too much pressure to the blade. I also read up on strops to realize that mine can actually use re-conditioning. I found a tutorial on Badger and Blade (http://wiki.badgerandblade.
Post 34
I wanted to state publicly that, even though I am a noob at wet shaving (at the time of writing this post, I am but seven months in), I am by no means a noob at my moustache, which has been with me these past eight years. In fact, I had tried growing it even earlier than that—a couple times in college, and in the years thereafter. I was always disappointed with the result, which only ever looked skuzzy, half-baked, and fully lame. What I didn’t realize in those early days was that it was actually half baked! I simply was not giving the moustache enough time to grow in the three and four-week experiments that characterized those early attempts. In fact, whenever I have a guy say (which, sadly, is very often), “Dude, great ‘stache! I wish I could grow one like that,” my reply is always, “You can!” It wasn’t until I determined, “Whatever it takes, I am growing this thing until it looks good!” that I started seeing the sought-after results. This was in 2006. In 2007 I started shooting what would become my short documentary, Between the Upper Lip and Nasal Passageway. That same year I shaved it for my wedding, which I do not regret, and but immediately thereafter grew it back. I’ve had it ever since, though it has gone through several phases. The first, and longest lasting phase so far has been the handlebar. Let’s say this lasted from 2006 until 2011 (minus, of course, the time it took to grow it back after shaving it for my wedding). At that point I did a little experimenting; I tried turning the corners down instead of up; I went down to a pencil moustache; I grew a full beard. At last I settled on a very conservative brush. This brush actually had a couple different phases of its own. Sometimes it was wider, encompassing areas beyond the edges of my mouth. More often it was narrower, going only so far as the corners. I tried it with longer hairs throughout, I tried it with shorter hairs throughout. Sometimes it looked better, sometimes worse. This was between 2011 and 2013. Then, along came Doug, How to Grow a Moustache, and eventually Moustache & Blade. I started to miss my handlebar. And so it’s back, and I’ve come full-circle with the ‘stache.
Post 35
Now that I have a second razor that I like to use, I came up with an idea for pushing the trial of blades up to a new level. I have stated that my favorite blade thus far is Rapira. You know that I went so far as to purchase three-years worth of the blades. What I decided to do was to use my Red Tip to continue loading up new blades from the sampler pack, while using my Tech to house a Rapira blade. I’d then use the two razors in tandem to complete a shave so I could feel two different blades, ostensibly, in unison. In this way too I could compare every new blade to my blade of choice, Rapira. The first bout happened today and was between Wilkinson Sword and Rapira. You may recall that early on Wilkinson Sword was my “first love” in the wet shaving world. Well, suffice it to say that I fell rapidly out of love with my old flame after she was subjected to this test with Rapira. Rapira won, hands dow
Read all of Ryan Steven Green’s Notes From The Noob Series!
Ryan Steven Green, aka Rynostevie, is a native Los Angeleno and a professional film and commercial director. Along with Douglas Smythe, he co-hosts the popular podcast–Moustache & Blade. It was Smythe’s discovery of his award-winning short documentary Between the Upper Lip and Nasal Passageway that initiated Ryan’s entree into the wet-shaving world. Contact Ryan: Ryan@moustacheandblade.com
About Douglas Smythe
