A safety razor is also a great investment and cheap. I bought a Wilkinson Sword handle $20 and a pack of five blades $5. It's an old name-brand sold practically everywhere. I can get more than a month out of one double-sided blade. Plus it shaves very close much better than multi-blade razors.
It's better than the two, three, four, five blade monstrosities that always get clogged in days. They also cost far too much literally 5x more than safety razor blades.
I've invested to a couple of stainless steel safety razors. An Edwin Jagger 3one6, and a Mühle R94. They're easy to maintain, have infinite life, and shave much better than top of the line cartridge razors from any manufacturer.
I also use a good but not expensive boar brush and shaving soap.
As a result, I either buy a new stick of shaving soap every six months, or a can of foam every year (for emergency morning shaves), and buying 100 blades every 2 years or so, for a much cleaner, comfortable and enjoyable shave for negligible money. Both razors have paid themselves as savings too.
Just want to warn that both razors are in the "efficient" category, which means they need some experience to use without any nicks, but they're not as wild as the open-combed, aggressive razors. If you want a milder, but equally long-living razor, go Mühle R89, Edwin Jagger EJ89, Merkur 34HD or Timor Gentle Butterfly.
I go through Mach 3 cartridges pretty slowly, so price isn't a big concern. And I don't notice anything deficient about the quality of my shaves. But one thing I really like about safety razors is that there's zero risk of serious injury.
In total I would never go back to a Mach3. The safety razor is just the all around superior product at a fraction of the price once you use it correctly.
Isnt't Mach3 a safety razor?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_razor
Of course if you want to go old school:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straight_razor
Slightly more convenient, but uses a similar technique:
* https://bespokeunit.com/shaving/shavette-vs-straight-razor/
Safety razors (single/double edge) are safe by comparison to 'cut throat' straight edges, not to cartridge razors.
(Because they came first. It's like 'New' College Oxford being something like the second oldest one.)
I tried the double edge safety razor. Got the brush, shaving cream, big pack of Astra blades. Watched a bunch of YouTube videos on technique.
Spent way more time shaving. Nicked myself an ungodly number of times. Somehow got a worse shave out of it. Ended up going back to the cartridge razor.
I really want to be a double edge razor guy, but I was not able to make it up the learning curve.
I really want it to work, but it's literally a blood bath.
Maybe it's the blades?
I started with Derby Extra blades[1], and without using any special technique I've nicked myself only maybe once a year with them.
The weight of the razor might also figure in to it -- I got a Parker 66R razor[2], which has a nice heft to it, which means I don't have to press in to my face with the razor -- the weight of the razor itself is enough.
If you had a plastic and/or light-weight razor maybe you had to press in to your face, which could account for the nicks.
Could be worth trying a different set of blades. The Astra Platinum were the Reddit hive mind recommend at the time, but this was ~8 years ago.
I’m also wondering if it might be a hair thing. My facial hair is thick/coarse, particularly on the upper lip, which is where I consistently nicked myself.
Short of a several pound handle I can’t imagine cutting it with the weight of the razor alone.
Also, before starting to shave you should wet your facial hair with hot/warm water for a few minutes to soften it up. I usually wet my face as soon as I get in to my shower and shave inside the shower a few minutes later.
A straight edged razor, by contrast, is just a knife, that you actually can kill yourself with by slicing deep enough into your neck to take out a major artery. You can't do that with a safety/multi-edge razor.
The straight razor incidents were pretty traumatizing, so much blood..
Stay safe <3
Edit: I double checked, it actually was with a safety razor. They don't have any buffer to avoid slicing you up compared to a mach3 or modern disposable razor. Please do be careful folks, they are super sharp and a single swipe can cut you up real good.
(Edit: to be clear I mean the spent metal blades? Not the plastic ones...)
If feasible, re-smelting them would be superior, as it'd skip the ore-to-iron high temperature chemistry process.
Don’t get mad at me, but what you need is a 5000, 8000 and maybe 12000 grit Naniwa (or comparable) superstone. Also, a good strop. Leather would be sufficient.
Send your razor off for establishing a good edge to Portland Razor Co. Once you get it back, you should be able to maintain that edge with minimal fuss.
Carbon steels can get sharper but you need to be really on top of it on maintenance. Stainless steel is more durable and tolerates some abuse but does not retain edge as well.
Lastly, don’t hurry while shaving, and don’t drop the damn razor please.
Source: Guilty as charged.
Also guilty: I did start growing a beard after dropping my favorite razor :/
Like 1200 before every shave? 800 once a week? Etc...? Do you ever need to go back to a coarser one?
Do you ever re-flatten your stones, or buy new ones? How often?
Remember that you keep a razor sharp by using the pasted strop and having a good maintenance routine. After a while the cutting edge becomes more convex, which is where the stone is needed to straighten out.
A coticule is flattened on every use, because you rub a smaller stone on it to create the milky suspension that will do the actual abrading. I've had the same stone for 20 years.
Quality of shave. If you maintain your straight razor, and mind it, it does require some maintenance, the quality of shave is of no comparison. My wife can instantly make out the difference when I shave in a hurry with Mach 3.
Shavettes have lower maintenance and are very similar to straights:
* https://bespokeunit.com/shaving/shavette-vs-straight-razor/
I sharpen my own knife and woodworking tools. So learning to sharpen my razor is no big deal.
Now my only expense is occasionally buying some soap or aftershave once a year or so. And my time I suppose maintaining the razor which isn’t much at all.
Definitely not the case for me. As someone whose been recently exploring properly sharpening some high quality kitchen knives at home, there's a cost in time for sure to do things correclty both learning and executing. Once you learn, it's not too bad but there's a learning curve and time factor that's difficult to ignore. I need to set aside a good hour or 1.5 hours on a given weekend to sharpen my knives (find and soak my soap stone, gather my knives, get back my angles and motions down pat).
I'm still a novice for sure and an expert may be able to sharpen quickly but that's a big difference from just grabbing a new disposable product ready to use. With a straight razor a certain amount of care also needs to be taken when shaving to reduce cuts -- safety razors aren't a bad invention overall. I suspect if you do a lot of regular shaving (e.g. body hair that's not just your face), it might become time consuming.
I'm not saying reuse and repair are bad investments, I'm a huge fan of these ideals, but the time involved can't be entirely ignored for some consumer products. In many (perhaps most) cases, I agree with the thesis of the article that modern business practices are becoming increasingly misaligned from consumers and societies interests and becoming nothing but wealth extraction optimization factories in various forms. But, I think not all products are so clear cut and some legitimate progresses are not reasonable tradeoffs for everyone, like a safety razor (maybe not cartridge based but similar to the one described in this article). Now a safety razor for a cartridge is a pretty close set of advantages/disadvantages with clear cost savings.
I only have to sharpen my straight razor maybe twice a year at most.
Kitchen knives depends on use but a typical sharpening is 15 minutes maybe? I might do this 3 - 4 times a year.
I do woodworking with hand tools which need to be sharpened far more often and that is fairly time consuming... but so is making wood projects from hand tools. I consider it part of the process.
If we get to fully economic decision making the case can be made to prefer convenience over all else because of paperclip maximization. Instead of buying organic clothes made by hand and spending the time to maintain and repair them we prefer fast-fashion. It's cheaper in time and money to simply buy a brand new shirt. Along with the many other benefits it entails.
But that has a cost too, doesn't it? Landfills chock full of disposed-of clothes, beaches covered in cables of clothes that have washed up on shore, and they're mostly made of oil-based products and will take centuries to degrade. People with families and children literally starving and wrecking their bodies in sweat shops to produce these throw-away, convenient, cheap clothes.
Some times taking time to do things the slow, inconvenient way has a lot of benefits too that are not immediately obvious until we take a step back and stop trying to be in such a rush.
The only bad thing about it is that it makes flying with just a carry-on impossible.
I still spend a not insignificant ~$250/yr on blades and shaving cream to shave face and head daily.
I admittedly don't shave every day, but I've been using a safety razor since 2013. I went back and tallied up all of the purchases for materials, including my razor, and I believe I've spent a little over $200 for that entire period, so maybe $25/year.
I have coarse hair, so that dulls the blade faster. And shaving a whole head probably counts as like three face shaves (in terms of both blades and shaving soap.)
For soap I use Proraso (which is cheap) or Taylor of Old Bond Street (unscented - they call it "organic" - which is not cheap.)
In the past I stretched blades and spent far less, but the experience was not as enjoyable.
I spent $15 on 200 double-edged safety razor blades a couple of years ago, and have used maybe 50 of them from shaving every-other-day.
At this rate that $15 in blades should last me 4 years.