When I was a lad, I shaved with a Philips Philishave electric shaver. This was entirely because my father worked for Philips, and gave me one when the first wisps of fluff started appearing on my chin.
But then, still a teenager, I read the Chronicals of Thomas Covenant, in which the protagonist, a leper living in the 'real world', is transported to a fantasy world of giants, prophecies, and magic rings, where he miraculously no longer has leprosy. Among other (less savoury) effects of being no longer leprous, Covenant can shave with a blade (something which, in the 'real world' would be fraught with danger), and he spends the rest of the novels shaving with a knife.A knife?! How the hell do you shave with a knife?
The idea, for some reason, captivated my testosterone-soaked adolescent mind.
As I couldn't figure out how to use an actual knife conveniently and safely, I opted for the nearest twentieth-century thing: a razor. And even since then, I've been shaving with a Gillette Mach 3 triple-blade razor.
These come with replaceable plastic heads, with a blue lubricating stripe that supposedly tells you when you need to replace it by turning white. I decided pretty early on that the stripe is, of course, a scam to make you buy the damn things more frequently than you need to; the razor works perfectly well for months after the strip turns from blue to white, and then from white to nothing because it's completely worn away.
Anyway, fast forward some decades, to my new-found discomfort with plastic disposable things. From a waste perspective, the razor I've been using is only one step better than a disposable razor - you don't throw away the handle every few months, only the head.
Wouldn't it be better to replace only the part that actually wears out? i.e. the blade itself! This revolutionary zero-waste idea, it turns out, has been around since the late nineteenth century, but it's such a good one that you can still get safety razors with replaceable blades.
Behold! My new shaving system:
So now, I only dispose of the blade, and it's steel to will rust away in a handful of years instead of being a monument to my lack of stubble for centuries to come, like the bucketful of my Mach 3 heads are, sprinkled throughout landfills of the world.
Of course, if I were a real zero-wastrel I wouldn't have bought a new razor from mancave.co.nz, I would have recovered one of my father's pre-Philips ones that I used to find in the junk drawer when I was a kid, and pretend they were space stations with docking-bay doors that opened to let space ships in.
What's the difference in terms of how it shaves? Beyond the scammy 'lubricating strip' that the new shaver lacks, it also shaves with only one blade, not three, and it doesn't have a tilting head to follow the contours of my jaw like a formula one car hugging the bends of the track.
Does this mean that my shave is now less close?
Nope.
