I switched to safety razors

Jul 07 2008

At the grocery store, trying to believe how many dollars Gillette wanted from me for a pack of cartridges, I finally got fed up and declared that there must be a better way to shave. It seemed like that for every other product I used, there was some kind of non-sleazy-seeming choice; the same must be true of razors. The Mach 3 and Fusion systems always struck me as kind of cheap and cartoony, a caricature of manliness that comes from the same fantasy land as the late-80’s G.I. Joe toys. The marketing uses the same dull, generically attractive women as beer commercials, and has the same insulting swoopy chrome branding as a cut-rate PC manufacturer. I did some exploratory Googling and came up with the legendary [How to get that perfect shave](http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6886845) article; that led me to the whole traditional shaving revival that’s going on around the internet these days. The line about safety razors being the way Cary Grant shaved sold me right away. :D It wasn’t much longer that I was ordering my own Merkur handle and blades. Doesn’t it look orders of magnitude classier than the others?