Twin Blades and Beyond

For 40 years, shaving technology stayed about the same. Sure, electric razors got a bit more sophisticated (and much more popular, thanks to men's apparently in-born love of electric gadgets and the appearance of electric razors in many popular movies). The injector razor made wet shaving a little safer.

Then, in the 1970s, wet shaving advanced again with the creation of the twin-blade cartridge. The idea had been around for awhile, but the revolution that occurred in the 70s happened from a marketing standpoint. Gillette put its full weight behind the twin-blade concept with a huge advertising blitz, and Schick then went head-to-head with Gillette. Everyone was taught that two blades were better than one through billions of dollars spent on advertising.

Image courtesy Amazon Two blades are better than one, three blades are better than two, and so on...

Development on the triple-blade razor began in the 1970s, but apparently there were problems with three blades. They caused irritation. In 1998 the solution to this problem appeared. The Mach 3 shaving system from Gillette uses three blades, but the blades are very small and each one is canted at a slightly different angle in the cartridge. The addition of lubricating strips, a flow-through blade design and other innovations made this the system to beat.

Schick rose to the challenge by introducing the Quattro, a four-blade shaving system. And Gillette rose to that challenge with the Gillette Fusion, at five blades. It would seem that this would mark the logical extreme in the evolution of multi-blade designs. Surely, if you can't get a close shave with 5 blades, the incremental improvement on a sixth blade is not going to help you much.

For shaving to advance from here, someone will have to re-conceptualize again. Perhaps everyone will turn to laser hair removal and solve the problem completely? Who knows.

Shaving Cream
Before leaving the topic of shaving, we should say something about lather. Wet shaving would be much more difficult if it weren't for some kind of lather to lubricate the whole process.

Originally (and still today for many people) the lubricant was soap. You can use plain old bathroom soap applied to the skin with your hand. But the tradition of the old shaving mug, with a bar of shaving soap at the bottom, is much more common. The soap is applied with a special shaving brush with bristles made of badger hair. Yes, badger hair.

Image courtesy Amazon A shaving mug and brush

According to How to get that perfect shave, the mug and brush are the only way to go when applying lather for a shave. But if you watch football, baseball and basketball on TV, you are led to believe otherwise. The commercials on these shows bombard men with the message that shaving cream in an aerosol can is the only way to go. We'll leave that debate for another time. But let's talk about shaving cream for one moment.

Image courtesy Brandon Blinkenberg, Stock.xchng

Have you ever looked at shaving cream after it comes out of the can? This is lather. The foam is almost structural in its density and strength. Kids love playing with it because it is very nearly moldable, like a very lightweight foamed plastic. It is nothing like the lather than you get from soap. So where does this kind of foam come from?

You can read all about the aerosol can in How Aerosol Cans Work. But neither the can nor the delivery system is the reason why this foam is so cool. The foam is made by the chemicals in the can.

According to How Products Are Made, all shaving creams contain the same basic ingredients:

A standard recipe contains pproximately 8.2 percent stearic acid, 3.7 percent triethanolamine, 5 percent lanolin, 2 percent glycerin, 6 percent polyoxyethylene sorbitan monostearate, and 79.6 percent water. Two major ingredients in this formula are common in many of today's preparations. Stearic acid is one of the main ingredients in soap making, and triethanolamine is a surfactant, or surface-acting agent, which does the job of soap, albeit much better. While one end of a surfactant molecule attracts dirt and grease, the other end attracts water. Lanolin and polyoxyethylene sorbitan monostearate are both emulsifiers which hold water to the skin, while glycerin, a solvent and an emollient, renders skin softer and more supple.

The combination of the glycerine, lanoline, Stearic acid and triethanolamine gives shaving cream is extra-creamy and dense lather. That is combined with the propellant (often butane or propane), which expands and instantly evaporates when it leaves the can, filling the foam with its millions of bubbles.

Shaving is obviously a big deal, and billions of people do it every morning. To learn lots more about shaving, check out the links on the next page.