Adventures in shaving

A while back I ended up having a nice discussion with the very splendid John Scalzi about the virtues of various gents’ shaving products. Scalzi likes a shave oil; myself, I’m a fan of Lush’s shaving goo, which looks like white walling putty but is like shaving with an army of microscopic hippy chicks in bikinis and muscular surf boys in wetsuits giving your chin a carwash. (In case you’re wondering, I regard this as a positive trait, though I can see where you might think it was weird).

All of which is preamble to the announcement that I have just been forced into something of an experiment in shaving, and since there was a wide and positive response to the last Harkaway disquisition on the razor, I feel I should chronicle the results here.

First: we went away last week and I left all my shaving stuff at home, so I was constrained to purchase my kit at a motorway service station. I declined the disposables as environmentally unsound and because the last time I used one it was like mauling myself with pieces of broken glass wrapped around an angry starfish. I therefore had to pick up a Wilkinson Sword item with four blades. Now, I’m starting to lose patience a bit with this whole blade-proliferation thing. It seems to me that there are now more blades in your local Boots than there are at a gang fight in a US Federal Prison. I usually use a Gillette Mach 3, which I grudgingly purchased when people stopped selling refills for my old reliable two-blade from 1996. Why I would need a piece of high-tech blade engineering with multiple straight edges to do something which my less intelligent ancestors managed perfectly well with a wobbly iron knife is beyond me. On the other hand, my less intelligent ancestors also believed that pregnant women caused earthquakes and that eating with your left hand turned you into a werewolf, so fuck them. Rock on, technology.

So, onwards! I have the impression that the Wilkinson Sword company actually does or did once make swords, and that original Mr Wilkinson was some sort of Regency Hatori Hanzo. If that’s the case, the old geezer is surely spinning like a Jenny in his grave at this moment, because the WS whatever-it’s-called is a rather soft experience. The four blades are no doubt terribly sharp, but actually getting them into contact with your skin is rather tricky, because the engineers have clearly been told to assume that modern man has no faint notion of self-preservation or skilled handling of sharp tools and will sue if he gets so much as a nick on his perfect Botoxed skin. This is a razor for the age of health and safety, born of the same urge as the warning on the side of a hazelnut chocolate bar that it may contain nuts. It’s like shaving with really sharp rubber spoon, and no matter what I did, I could not get it to pick up all my bristles. I did, however, manage to cut myself along the underside of the jaw, or rather, to leave a trail of micro cuts which bled as if I’d been attacked by a very small Rebel Fleet determined to fly into my Death Star head and explode the main reactor in my pineal gland. The science of leaving holes in me while at the same time not removing hair from my face is baffling. No doubt there are equations for it, or will be, but I can’t shake the feeling that I would have been safer and less bloody if I’d had a sharp, simple razor and the nous to use it.

And then there’s shaving foam. I had to use that stuff which squirts out of a can as blue slime and turns into foam on contact. It smells of public loos. I know it’s made with artificial badger hormone which drives women into sexual ecstasy and causes cats to ovulate on the spot, but – even accepting for a moment that I want these things to happen and that I have secretly always hoped to become a pinup on the wall of artificial badgers everywhere – I can’t shake the feeling that I carry around with me the whiff of communal sanitation. I know – I can tell, because writers have a secret superpower which allows this sort of perception, which normal humans believe is paranoia, but it isn’t – I know that people are wondering if I’ve done a face-plant into a urinal.

So on the whole, I cannot recommend this combination of shaving products. In the end, the bleeding stopped and a hint of the ground coffee scent Mrs H likes disguised the badgers, or at least made them look like New York beat badgers in anarcho-syndicalist berets rather than regular badgers, but the topology of my face remained a curious muddle of baby smooth and cornfield stubble, and I went about feeling oddly lopsided.

Teach me to pack at the last minute, I suppose…