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As the "tech editor" for NBC's Today Show, Corey Greenberg spends most of his on-air time shilling for the latest technological gadgets. (Literally, shilling—last April the Wall Street Journal revealed that several technology companies had paid him handsomely for his promotional efforts.) He can tell you why you need a video iPod, what you're missing without satellite radio, and where to put the fifty-inch flat screen tv. But on January 29, 2005, he was enthusiastically undermining half a century's worth of high technology.
In the Today Show studio, Greenberg lathered up his face with English shaving cream and a badger brush, whipped out a vintage double-edge razor, and made a passionate case that the multi-billion-dollar shaving industry has been deceiving its customers ever since 1971, when Gillette (no small advertiser on network television) introduced the twin-blade razor. Everything you need for a fantastically close and comfortable shave, Greenberg said, was perfected by the early 20th century.
With his Today Show segment, Greenberg became the highest-profile convert to "wet shaving." He is still one of its most fervent evangelists, with—what else?—a blog, www.shaveblog.com. At 120,000 words and counting, Greenberg's blog could best be described as gonzo shave journalism. He explores every nook and, for that matter, nick of the wet shaving experience, whose defining elements are a single sharp blade (whether ensconced in a safety razor or exposed in the fearsome straight-edge), a brush, soap, and lots of hot water.
But Greenberg's blog is just the most visible salient of a movement that has all the ingredients to reach its tipping point. I first discovered this utterly retro trend on the über-geek Web site del.icio.us, where most links tend to point to topics like "Javascript" and "hardware" (the computer kind). There are the requisite Internet forums populated by enthusiastic "shave geeks" and several specialty retailers that are selling more old-fashioned shaving products than ever. The shaving emporium Truefitt & Hill recently opened a shop in, of all places, Las Vegas. Wet shaving is far from being a mass movement, but it is growing, primarily because almost every man who tries it discovers that, in fact, Greenberg was right: with a little time and practice, shaving with a single blade can deliver an extraordinary shave, and is great fun besides.
Meanwhile, in January of this year Gillette launched its newest "shaving system," the Fusion. Its cartridges have six blades—five in a row and a sixth on the back of the razor. Each cartridge costs more than three dollars. When an editor for Cargo magazine tried the Fusion—after a Gillette "facialist" prepared his face with "a variety of moisturizing unguents and salves"—the razor cut his neck in three places.
When I tell my friends that I have switched to wet shaving, they ask three questions, usually in the following order. Don't you cut yourself? Doesn't it take more time in the mornings? And isn't it expensive to buy all the necessary equipment, compared to a drugstore razor and can of shaving cream? The answers are yes I do, yes it does, and not necessarily.
Indeed, one of the most fascinating aspects of the Gillette–Schick juggernaut is how these companies have managed to extract extraordinary profits by selling plastic cartridges to the masses, while the shaving brush, emblem of the wet shaver, has somehow become an icon of the affluent. Until I stumbled across Greenberg's testimony, the only shaving brushes I had ever seen were displayed in opulent cases in high-end department stores and had prices in three figures.
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