It’s been a bit over a year since I shaved my beard off in its entirety for the first time in about twenty years. Tonight, I want to share some numbers related to razor use from the year. They’re not complete as I didn’t really start keeping track until early May, when I came across the Shaving Buddy app for my Android based tablet. Now, I’m a sucker for that sort of thing anyway, but I didn’t realize just how much I would use it. I wound up buying the full version within a week, and recording over 260 shaves in 238 days!
The down side of the app is that the reporting is very limited. I poked around a bit last week and found that the app works as a front-end for a SQLite3 database. (I warned you: I’m a computer geek and I know just enough to be dangerous…)
Once I figured that out, it was a fairly simple operation to dump the data for the year to an Excel workbook. From that spreadsheet I came up with the following numbers.
Total Shaves Recorded: 266
| 95 | DE |
| 75 | Weck Shavette |
| 45 | Rolls |
| 32 | SE |
| 12 | Other Shavette |
| 6 | Other SE |
| 1 | Injector |
The DE Razors included, in no particular order: Gillette New Standard, Gillette Gold Tech (Heavy), Gilette Old Style, Gilette Thin Adjustable, Gillette Bar-Handled New, FaTip Piccolo, FaTip Piccolo, Gilette Fat Boy, Gillette Tech (Gold), Gillette Travel Tech, (The) Unknown Slant, Gillette Tech (Triangle), Gillette Milord, Merkur 37c Slant (1 shave only.)
Weck Shavettes included a shaper, a standard Sextoblade, and a “Nurses” razor (i.e. a stainless steel Sextoblade without the caduceus.) The vast majority of these shaves saw me using the standard Sexto. It is pretty much my daily driver for right now, although I think I’m going to start changing things up again. (So many razors, so few shaves!) In a future post I’ll detail my experiences with different blades.
My Rolls is a single set with two blades, both of which I honed myself. It took a few tries, but this is actually my favorite razor. I get consistent results with it now that it’s sharp enough and I’ve got the maintenance figured out. (Thanks MJClark!) This set is going to see regular use this year!
The Single Edge Razors, again in no particular order included a Gem Junior (1912), AutoStrop Valet VC1, Gem MicroMatic Open Comb, Gem G-Bar, Gem Flying Wing, and a Gem Micromatic. I like them all, but the Valet is my favorite in this catagory. I have a bunch of OEM blades and a couple of different models to try this year. These will be the subject of a future post as well.
The “Other Shavettes” include a Parker SR-1, Vanta RA-111 and an RA-112. I purchased the Parker off of the BST and passed it on. I like the Vantas better, especially the 111, which uses a full DE blade.
The “Other SE” is seven day Wilkinson Sword Empire set that I used with a cut down shaper blade in lieu of cleaning up the wedge blades—a project for this year. The injector is a Schick-Eversharp.