Week 2: Shave with a Safety Razor

As I began to devise challenges for this project, I looked to what I always look to for inspiration – pop culture.  I figured that any action movie would give me the groundwork I needed to get started.  This also provided a great excuse to make Q watch Die Hard again.

schick razor

But as it so happens, Q is a huge WWII buff, so when it was her turn to choose our masculine education for the evening, she chose the ten-hour HBO docudrama Band of Brothers.  Well played, Q.  As we gorged on the episodes over the course of a few days, I watched carefully for manly challenges I could pursue that wouldn’t require dodging mortar fire.

While his platoon shivered and lost their minds in the bitter cold during the Battle of the Bulge, Major Dick Winters kept morale up by shaving each day with freezing cold water and a safety razor.  If shaving is what it took to keep a platoon’s hope alive while evading frostbite and German artillery fire, then perhaps a clean shave should be in my man arsenal.

I’ve become too complacent as it is with my shaving routine.  I use a Gillette Fusion ProGlide Power Razor, which I believe was also the working name for the Large Hadron Collider before the scientists realized it would be too long for a Twitter handle.  It’s a good razor, but I get the sense that the technology fitted into it is about as masculine as the technology that turns the beer bottle blue when it’s at optimum drinking temperature.

The Gillette Fusion Collider ProGlide Power Ranger Razor has a green strip that turns to white when the cartridge is ready to be changed.  It has 5 blades on it so I could shave while inebriated and still not nick myself.  Its website totes its “ergonomic side grips for better handling.”  Yikes.  I think we would all be speaking German at this point if instead of holding the line, Major Winters had been looking for a AA battery because the microchip inside his razor had died.

It was time to make shaving dangerous again.  Sign me up for the double-edge safety razor platoon, sir.

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