A brief history of razors
Facial hair has troubled men for 100,000 years. They have been plucking and shaving their beards since they were able to fashion tweezers out of clam shells and get a sharp, cutting edge from stone (such as flint or obsidian). The ancient Egyptians and Indians used blades made of copper and gold.
Being clean-shaven became the norm in ancient Greece. It was associated with personal hygiene, but also for foot-soldiers this was a practical concern: in close combat, the enemy could grab a beard and hold the victim long enough to deliver several blows of a dagger.
Rome: the discomforts of fashion
As in everything, the Romans followed the Greek style. Barbers imported from the Greek colonies in Sicily were working in Rome by the 3rd century BC. Our word barber is derived from the Latin for a beard: barba; but in Rome a barber was a tonsor (from tondere, to shave), the origin of the word for the monk’s shaven head.
A smoothly shaven face was a mark of class in Rome, distinguishing a man from slaves and others who could afford neither the time nor the expense of regular shaving. But it was a painful privilege: young men were given a ritual first shave at the age of 21, and thereafter had to endure regular soapless scrapings at the hands of the barber.
Some of these barbers were women, but that did not imply less of an ordeal. The poet Martial (c.AD 41–104) complained of one that “she does not so much shave you as skin you alive.” But the frequent cuts could at least be treated – with a concoction made of spiders’ webs soaked in oil and vinegar. One compensation for this brutal obligation to fashion was that barbers’ shops were social gathering points, a good place for gossip; however, despite a potential for amalgamation, they remained separate enterprises from the baths.
Emperor Hadrian (reigned AD 117–138) reversed the trend by growing a beard to disguise some kind of skin complaint. What the Emperor did, the citizens copied.
Attitudes to shaving have remained complex ever since. On the one hand, being clean-shaven was associated with youthful vitality, a link cast in stone in Europe by the statues of Greek gods and heroes. On the other hand, beards were associated with venerable old age and wisdom: Christ’s Apostles were usually portrayed as bearded. That said, Christians might shave to distinguish themselves from Muslims and Jews.
Under the knife
A barber’s talent for wielding a knife was also applied to surgery. Barbers were the surgeons of the Middle Ages, regularly carrying out such tasks as bleeding, as well as amputations, enemas, dental extraction, and applying leeches. Barbers’ shaving bowls – broad dishes with a half-moon chunk missing from the rim to fit to the client’s neck – were also used as bleeding vessels. The barber’s pole, striped with blood-red, is a vestige of this era.
In England, the link was formally acknowledged by the creation of the professional body the Company of Barber-Surgeons in 1540, and it was two centuries before the medical profession took surgery firmly under its own wing, and gradually confined barbers to the tasks of hairdressing and shaving.
DIY shaving
High-quality, steel-edged straight razors were being made in Sheffield, the centre of the English cutlery industry, from the 1680s. For comfort and efficiency, razors had to be kept super-sharp: barbers honed their blades on a finely-grained stone, and sharpened them before every shave against a leather or canvas strop.
In the world of shaving, there has always been a conflict of interest between a really sharp razor and the dangers this implies to anyone in the vicinity. Not for nothing was the standard “straight razor” also known as the “cut-throat razor”. A pivot, allowing the user to fold the razor blade into the wooden handle, offered a measure of security when the razor was not in use. But it was a Frenchman, Jean-Jacques Perret (1730–84), who first proposed the safety razor in 1761. Inspired by the carpenter’s plane, he saw how a razor blade could be sheathed by a wooden guard to expose only the cutting edge, thereby avoiding deep cuts.
Being clean-shaven went hand in hand with the wearing of wigs, beneath which heads were usually completely shaved: shaving therefore was a big issue in Perret’s day. Part of Perret’s agenda was to promote the idea that men could shave themselves, instead of depending on barbers or private servants, and he produced a book called Pogonotomie, ou l'Art d'Apprendre à se Raser Soi-Même (Pogonotomie, or The Art Learning how to Shave Oneself).
This idea began to catch on only a century later, after the German-born Kampfe brothers patented a safety-razor in the USA in 1880. This had the familiar T-form of safety razors today, although the head was shaped more like a mallet. In addition, the blade still had to be honed and stropped. For more information about these developments, see: www.razorandbrush.com/perkam.html
Gillette
The American travelling salesman King Camp Gillette (1855–1932) made the next great breakthrough. When working for the Crown Cork & Seal Company, he saw the commercial genius of disposable bottle caps: as their inventor, William Painter, advised: “Invent something that people use once and then throw away. That way they’ll have to keep coming back for more.”
One day, in 1895, while shaving with safety razor, Gillette suddenly saw the huge advantage of cheap, disposable blades – blades that would not require honing and stropping. It took him six years, assisted by engineer William Nickerson, to perfect the technology of producing fine slithers of sharp steel. He filed a patent in 1901, and his double-headed safety razor went into production in 1904.
Sales were initially slow, but by 1906 Gillette had sold 90,000 razors and 12.4 million blades. The First World War was a turning point: Gillette supplied the US Army with 3.5 million razors and 32 million blades, and soldiers came home convinced of the ease and convenience of shaving themselves at home using a safety razor with disposable blades.
Gillette applied a classic sales technique, now known as the “razor and blades business model”: induce the customers to buy a piece of hardware, then hook them into years of repeat purchases of essential, disposable attachments.
The new ease and convenience of home-shaving reinforced the vogue for the clean-shaven look. It put paid to the varied cosmetic possibilities of Victorian whiskers; it also relegated barbers to the role of hairdressers.
Fully disposable
Disposable stainless steel blades were introduced in the early 1960s: protected from corrosion, this gave a blade a much longer life. In the interests of ever greater safety, blades were soon mounted into cartridges that could be clipped into handles – a development that allowed manufacturers to ensure that customers bought only their brand of blade to fit their handle.
The logical conclusion of Gillette’s invention, however, was the totally disposable razor. This became possible with the availability of cheap and robust plastics, and entered the market in the 1970s: the Bic fully disposable razor first appeared in 1974.
Meanwhile, it was found that a double blade (two blades mounted closely in parallel) would give a closer shave by catching stubble on the rebound. With the introduction of the five-bladed head in 2006, there seems to be no limit to this trend.
Electric shavers
The retired US army officer Lieutenant-Colonel Jacob Schick battled with a number of shaving inventions before he patented the first effective “electric dry shaver” in 1928. The “dry” in the name draws attention to its attraction: customers could shave without soap and a basin.
Schick’s machine used blades that oscillated back and forth behind a slotted screen that was pushed over the stubble. This foil-and-blade method has remained one of the two principal technologies in electric shavers, followed for example by Braun. The other is the rotary system, first proposed in the 1930s by Alexandre Horowitz, a Belgian-born inventor living in the Netherlands. It became the basis for the Philishave, launched in 1939. The cordless shaver with internal, rechargeable batteries, introduced by Remington in 1960, permitted users to shave even when out of reach of an electric current.
For pictures, see the “Electric Shaver Museum”: www.xs4all.nl/~pedewei/index.htm
