Straight shaving for the baby
One of the things I picked up early on in daddyhood was the requirement to have a not prickly face for the kidding of the babies. My options on this are to grow a beard over an inch in length, or shave.
While that doesn’t sound like much of a problem for most, I’ve had great difficulty shaving most of my life. Much like the hair on my head, my facial hair has a mind of its own, is absurdly thick, and doesn’t do what I want it to do.
My hair also clogs up most razors within a use or two rendering expensive four or five-razor head options an extremely costly waste of money, and the electric razors tend to leave my face feeling like sandpaper.
Recently at a baby checkup, to keep baby M in check and not bored while we were waiting on the doctor to get in the room I zerberted the baby’s belly along with chucking her in the air and normal baby distraction techniques.
When the doctor came in she immediately noticed a red rash all across Maggie’s stomach, it was beard burn from ten minutes prior, and this was a few hours after shaving.
It was time for a change.
I’ve been using one of the Costco huge disposable razor packs by Gillette. I don’t feel particularly bad about chucking one of those after a use or two, but the downside is they just don’t do a particularly great job of shaving me. They do a fine job I think on people who don’t have porcupine hair
So with cost and performance being problems, I decided to try an old school method of shaving, that being a straight razor for straight shaving.
I’d had a straight shave once before as a birthday gift. Straight shaving evidently descended into the hipster arena and what was ten cents thirty years ago is now thirty dollars, so these are not things I can afford professionally.
I found a straight razor kit on Amazon for $9.99, I didn’t have much hope of this working or being something I’d find useful for that price, but I got tired of giving my baby beard burn within two hours of shaving.
I started out learning how to shave the cheeks. Those are the easiest parts, and two cuts later finished up with a safety razor.
The difference between the straight razor and the safety was evident, both in that the straight razor was cleaner and smooth, and that the straight razor looked like I’d been attacked by a straight razor.
Round one was bloody, round two more so, round three I managed to shave the cheeks and my neck with no nicks, but when finishing up the upper lip and chin with the safety razor I managed to cut myself with it. I guess anything associated with hipsters has to have an ironic component these days.
It took five times, but I’m now able to basically shave my entire face with a straight razor with no nicks, but it still takes extra time.
Plus side though is I can kiss a baby and not leave marks, minus side is extra time and I could theoretically kill myself.
If you’re looking for a good starter kit that will let you see if you actually can consider this, look into the one I got. It comes with a base handle and 100 flat razor blades, which at current writing I’m not even close to needing to swap the first one out yet. Assuming a use of 10 times per razor, that comes to a penny per shave.
Replacement boxes halve that cost later on, so you could be looking at a yearly cost of shaving of about a buck fifty in razor material. Maybe a couple of dollars in shaving creams.
It could also get your neck slashed with a razor blade in a shaving horror story, so keep this in mind too. I’d also suggest having your tetanus shots in order just in case. I dont think it could give you that, but man, my first attempts were not pretty.
So if you’re looking to get into straight shaving, it can be done for $9.99 at Amazon, shipping already included. You don’t have to order a bunch more to get free shipping. It’s not the best straight razor set out there, but if you’re looking to see if you just want to try it this is a good little set.
Some words of caution:
- Assemble while dry, don’t handle razor blade while wet
- Make sure to angle the blade as much as possible when shaving. The harder the angle, the less chance of catching the edge and digging in your face
- Put the closed blade up out of reach of kiddos
- Hide the pack of straight razors in the garage or something. They’re extremely dangerous to kiddos
- There’s a reason these are not called “safety” razors
- After shave balm is actually quite useful
- Be careful
