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And in fact the wet shaving market operates in direct contradiction to the hard-won insights of consumer marketing. The legendary brilliance of King Gillette was to sell razors below cost and blades above—way above—cost. Today, a Fusion razor with one extra cartridge is only $10, the magical amount at which most middle-class Americans will make an impulse purchase. A new safety razor from Merkur, one of the few remaining manufacturers in the category, is around $30. And whereas Gillette's Edge shaving gel goes for $2 or $3 a can, a tube of Italy's Proraso shave cream is $9, and many other shave creams come in tubs priced at $25 or more. A good badger-hair shaving brush does not, it turns out, have to cost three figures (though there are plenty of merchants who will happily sell you one for that amount), but it will not be less than $40.
But over time the numbers change places. The Merkur razor, forged of implacable stainless steel, will last several lifetimes. There is simply nothing in it to wear out. The shaving brush will last a decade or more. Replacement double-edge blades range from inexpensive (Merkur's fearsomely thin and sharp blades are 45 cents each) to dirt cheap (at Wal-Mart, which sells perfectly serviceable blades). A year's supply of Proraso is roughly three tubes—$27. So in the first year of wet shaving, a frugal wet shaver might spend $120 or so. But a customer who follows the siren song of Gillette marketing up the brand ladder to the Fusion will spend $150 on blades alone. In succeeding years the wet shaver, already equipped with the razor and brush, can indulge in the ridiculously luxurious Trumper's English shave cream—two tubs, a year's supply, are $50—and still be spending only half as much as his Gillette-addled counterpart.
But Gillette, savvy capitalists that they are, are not marketing their product on price. And the truth is that in spite of their slogan, "The best a man can get," they are not marketing based on the quality of their shaves either. The best shave a man can get, as everyone in the shaving industry knows, is one he cannot give himself, because by far the best shave a man can get comes from a barber—the shave that starts with the application of hot towels and warm lather, and culminates in the practiced gliding of a cut-throat razor over the face of the grateful, and assiduously immobile, patient.
No, for Gillette and its well-researched customers, the issue is neither price nor quality. It is convenience—or, as the philosopher Albert Borgmann has put it more precisely, "disburdenment." Gillette promises to relieve you of the burden of getting a close shave. You will be relieved of the upfront cost of razor and brush, to be sure (though it would be entirely within Gillette's power to once again produce, as they did for decades, an economical safety razor that would last a lifetime). But you are also relieved of the burden of time. There's no way around it: wet shaving takes more time. For years I used a succession of electric razors that did an adequate job in three or four minutes; wet shaving takes me ten to twelve.
And there is the issue of shaving cuts, those tiny lesions that can bleed for half an hour if not staunched with a styptic pencil or a bit of tissue paper. I never once got a shaving cut from my electric razor—it buzzed innocuously over my face, its blades well sheathed. The latest cartridge razors, the Cargo editor's experience notwithstanding, are indeed designed to minimize the number of cuts, and they do tolerably well at it. A safety razor, on the other hand, looks anything but safe when you are loading a skinny double-edged blade into it for the first time, and in the hands of an inattentive or inexperienced user it is indeed capable of harm. This, it seems to me from my anecdotal polling of family and friends, is the core appeal of the cartridges and electrics that have driven wet shaving from the general market. They are easy, and they are safe. That is the way we want our lives—or at least, in the fog of the early morning, our shaves.
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