Investment or Indulgence? The Shaving Kit Saga

Ear­lier this month, as reported in my Daily $$ entry, I spent a rather large chunk of change on some shav­ing equip­ment for The Son.  A week later, I spent another large amount of money on shav­ing prod­uct.  I imag­ine that some peo­ple will have trou­ble under­stand­ing how I could spend so much money on shav­ing equip­ment espe­cially since the recip­i­ent of the equip­ment is a 13yo boy who has never even shaved before.  Well if you really want to know, get your­self a refresh­ment, pull up a chair, and read the story.

The boy in ques­tion is a tall, thin, slightly quirky youth of 13 years (he’ll turn 14 in August).  Although he’s taller than aver­age, he looks younger than his peers.  He has a cer­tain naive or unjaded look about him — he has always reminded me of a tur­tle with­out a shell.  Despite his youth­ful appear­ance, puberty is work­ing it’s magic — the boy is becom­ing a man.  His voice dropped a full year ago — just dropped, overnight; not a sin­gle crack or break.  And he has a dark fuzzy cater­pil­lar liv­ing over his upper lip and a few ran­dom wiry hairs grow­ing out of his chin.  He’s not yet in need of a daily shave but I can see the day com­ing quickly when he will at least need a shave or two a week (well, okay maybe he’ll start with a shave every week or two and then move up from there).

When The Daugh­ter was younger and start­ing down the puberty road, I knew what kind of equip­ment and infor­ma­tion I needed to have on hand and I was pre­pared.  But with The Son I’m a lit­tle out of my ele­ment and I mis­tak­enly assumed that The Hus­band would cover all of that (but that’s a dif­fer­ent post altogether).

So far I’ve been able to nego­ti­ate these puberty-related issues (ie. pro­tec­tive cups for sports and “turn-and-cough” doctor’s appoint­ments) but I’m still not very good at antic­i­pat­ing them in advance. As such, I’d never really put much thought into shav­ing equip­ment — what to get? When would it be needed? After all, I know quite a bit about shav­ing legs but I know noth­ing at all about shav­ing faces.

Then one day I came across an arti­cle by Glblguy at Gather Lit­tle By Lit­tle titled A Bet­ter Shave For Less Money.  Not long after­ward, Brett (of The Art of Man­li­ness and The Fru­gal Law Stu­dent) wrote about How To Shave Like Your Grandpa.  My foray into the art of shav­ing had begun.

Since read­ing those arti­cles, I’ve gone on to do quite a bit of research on the sub­ject of wet-shaving and have learned more about shav­ing than I ever thought pos­si­ble.  I put this knowl­edge to use in decid­ing to intro­duce The Son to the con­cept of wet-shaving and in pur­chas­ing shav­ing equip­ment for him.

First, what is wet-shaving?  The term “wet-shaving” refers to the process of shav­ing with a lubri­cant and a razor as opposed to using an elec­tric razor.

Other than dur­ing his var­i­ous stints in the hos­pi­tal, The Hus­band has always been a wet-shaver pre­fer­ring the closer, smoother shave he gets with a wet shave to that of an elec­tric razor.  As for myself, I know from expe­ri­ence that I get a much closer shave with a dis­pos­able razor and some soap than with an elec­tric razor no mat­ter what brand it is or what they promise.  There­fore, being wet-shavers ourselves, it sim­ply never occurred to us to pro­vide the son with any­thing other than a razor and some shav­ing cream.

But as I con­tin­ued to read I quickly learned that there’s wet-shaving and then there’s clas­sic wet-shaving.

The Hus­band is a wet-shaver. He uses an ancient Shick injec­tor blade razor that I believe he’s owned for the bet­ter part of his adult life (mind you, he’s almost 73 so that’s a pretty long time). I’ve never seen him use a dis­pos­able razor but he speaks of them with the voice of expe­ri­ence so I assume that he has tried them at some point.  As for the shav­ing lubri­cant, The Hus­band uses Gillette’s lemon-line canned shav­ing foam.

As a real-razor user, The Hus­band was com­pletely on board as far as buy­ing The Son a real razor though he would have pre­ferred to buy him a single-edge injec­tor razor just like his own. Since no one makes single-edged razors (in fact, you can hardly even get the blades any­more), he had no option but to accept the idea of get­ting a double-edged razor (aka safety razor). How­ever, being the kind of guy he is, The Hus­band balked at the idea of a bad­ger brush and “clas­sic” wet shav­ing. [What in the world is this “it was good enough for me” macho BS thing that men do? I really and truly do not under­stand that.]

Ah, but The Hus­band, in his ulti­mate wis­dom, has left me in charge of guid­ing The Son through puberty.  That means I’m free to encour­age The Son to try his hand at clas­sic wet-shaving.

At first, the idea of using a real razor and a old-fashioned shav­ing brush appealed to me just because it seems so … classy. Now that I’ve done more research, I’m con­vinced that there are lots of com­pelling rea­sons to use a brush and shav­ing cream or soap over canned com­mer­cial foams. For one, canned shav­ing cream con­tains harsh chem­i­cals. From what I’ve seen among the son’s shav­ing peers, shav­ing is tough on those ado­les­cent faces. The chem­i­cals and dry­ing agents from canned foam and com­mer­cial after­shave are the last thing they need. Also, although there’s still waste from pack­ag­ing, at least shav­ing creams and soaps don’t send empty aerosol cans to the landfills.

The prac­tice of wet-shaving in gen­eral and clas­sic wet-shaving (using a badger-hair brush with shav­ing cream/soap) have enjoyed a revival and there seems to be a thriv­ing on-line wet-shaving sub­cul­ture. 

This active sub-culture made edu­cat­ing myself on prod­uct, equip­ment, and tech­nique an easy and inter­est­ing process.  Part of my self-education process has been to watch a num­ber of excel­lent videos by Mantic59 on YouTube [his blog, his YouTube videos].  In addi­tion, I’ve spent hours read­ing shav­ing boards [ShaveMyFace.com, BadgerandBlade.com, and The Shave Den] and perus­ing the offer­ings of on-line shav­ing equip­ment sup­pli­ers [Lee’s Safety Razors, Clas­sic Shav­ing, and The Art of Shav­ing].  I even took a few trips to local malls to visit stores that carry men’s shav­ing prod­ucts [Crab­tree & Eve­lyn and The Art of Shav­ing].

Wet-shaving is fine but why go all out on equip­ment and prod­uct for The Son from the beginning?

This, folks, is the mil­lion dol­lar ques­tion.  And I don’t have a sim­ple answer.  Some read­ers will get it, oth­ers won’t.

To be per­fectly hon­est, the main rea­son is “because I can.”  My bud­get isn’t so tight that I can’t afford to take the risk that The Son will hate using a safety razor and a shav­ing brush.  But that’s just the sur­face answer.  The real answer is slightly more com­pli­cated but more important.

For one thing, The Son is very much a crea­ture of habit.  I knew quite well that what­ever method, equip­ment, and atti­tude The Son had toward his first shave would likely be the same 15 years and many, many shaves later. 

Sec­ondly, there are those who argue that shav­ing with a razor and a brush are more eco­nom­i­cal in the long run.  With the proper care, the razor and brush I pur­chased could poten­tially last The Son his entire life­time.  This post is already novel-length so I won’t to go into a full shav­ing cost analy­sis but the num­bers I crunched show that even if he were to neglect and abuse his shav­ing equip­ment and need to replace it in 10 years, the cost of dis­pos­ables is over twice that of a safety razor and blades.

Even if the equip­ment expense worked to to being equal, there’d still be the obvi­ous advan­tage of a decreased envi­ron­men­tal impact.  Yes, with clas­sic wet­shav­ing you do have used blades and empty shav­ing cream jars or tubes but that seems prefer­able to a hill of used dis­pos­able razors and empty aerosol cans.

If that weren’t enough, as I stated above, those harsh chem­i­cals are hard on the skin.  I can’t think of bet­ter time for a “man” to baby his face with high-quality prod­uct than when he still has a baby face.

Why not start with beginner’s prod­ucts, like a Pure Bad­ger brush, and buy up later? 

Again, partly because I can.

But more so, why buy two brushes when just one will do?  Start­ing out with a lower-quality prod­uct would likely end up cost­ing me more in the long run.

From every­thing I’ve read, men who use shav­ing brushes always end up upgrad­ing to a bet­ter qual­ity bad­ger hair.  And if a lower-quality brush is likely to have an impact on the com­fort and sat­is­fac­tion of the shave, The Son is more likely to take to his shav­ing brush if it’s of higher quality.   Therefore I’ve increased the odds that he’ll become a life-time shav­ing brush user and less­ened the odds that I’ve wasted my money by buy­ing a high-quality brush.

Wouldn’t it be eas­ier to learn how to shave with a dis­pos­able and move up to a safety razor?

I’m not a sta­tus buyer and I cer­tainly don’t believe in throw­ing money away. But I do believe in buy­ing qual­ity and I do believe that we do best by our chil­dren when we pro­vide them with real tools when they’re ready to han­dle them.

I expect that there will be a learn­ing curve to using a safety razor and a shav­ing brush. But surely there would be a learn­ing curve no mat­ter what shav­ing method he used — even an elec­tric razor. There’s no rea­son to expect that The Son will, in the long run, have any trou­ble fig­ure out how to shave.

Couldn’t such a large expense be saved for a birth­day or Christ­mas or some other exist­ing gift-giving occasion?

Maybe this thought won’t occur to any­one else but it was a thought that I wres­tled with.  In the end, it was The Daugh­ter who helped me decide this issue. She could under­stand the rea­son­ing for giv­ing the equip­ment as a birth­day gift, after all, it’s pretty expen­sive. But the fact is, need­ing to shave is a rite-of-passage. It’s a part of the puberty process and should be cel­e­brated as such.  She reminded me of how we had cel­e­brated her onset of puberty with a spe­cial rit­ual (she was allowed to get her ears pierced).  I thought she was “spot on” and I appre­ci­ated her insight and wisdom.

So, that’s the sum­mary of our foray into the exi­c­it­ing world of clas­sic wet-shaving.  Moms and Dads, how did you deal with your sons?  Or for those with younger boys, any plans?  Dads, are you wet-shavers?  What’s your take on all of this?

No related posts.