Back when they still existed but long after we stopped calling them lunatic asylums, I used to volunteer one afternoon a week at an old-fashioned mental hospital, chatting to the small number of permanent patients who remained there, I suppose to give them a break from chatting endlessly to each other.
A couple of people stuck in my mind. One was a woman who had been thrown through the windscreen of her Kombi van, whose mind was trapped in a five-minute loop such that I would have the exact same conversation with her over and over, every time I visited (I can still recite much of it to this day, though it's too rude to print). The other was a man who always had so many cuts on the edge of his nostrils that I was convinced he was trying to do himself in through 1000 cuts, but who one day explained to me that he had simply been trying to shave properly.
"Oh that funny, crazy man!" I used to think to myself in the years after I stopped visiting. I chuckled at his antics right up until the year when my own shaving area grew up under my own nose, and I started to occasionally cut myself on the edge of my nostrils, just like he had.
The crazy man wasn't crazy after all. He was just older than me.
I'm reminded of him because I've been reviewing a new razor from Gillette, one that's based around the idea that if we men stopped to properly analyse the way we shave, we'd realise we shave the same patch of skin over and over, rather like the woman stuck in the conversation loop except that, where her five-minute story was endlessly entertaining (as I said, I can't go there), going over the same patch of skin can just be irritating.
So Gillette has come up with a new five-blade cartridge, known as the Fusion Proshield, which has lubricating strips BEFORE and AFTER the blades (their emphasis, not mine), supposedly to stop your skin being irritated by re-shaving over an area where you've already removed the lather.
The extra lubricating strip BEFORE the blades may well work as advertised. I've shaved with it three times now, and an area of skin with swirling whiskers that always gets irritated by shaving (one of the joys, I suppose, of having demented, curly hair) hasn't been irritated at all since I started using the Proshield. But it's too soon to tell for sure.
What I can tell you for sure is that the extra lubricating strip BEFORE the five blades, coupled with the lubricating strip AFTER the blades, exacerbated by the fact that there are five blades instead of the one "safety blade" I'm used to (a misnomer, if ever there was one), make it damned hard for me to shave right under my nostrils. Impossible, as far as I can tell, without shoving it right in there at the risk of cutting myself.
These past few days, I've been faced with a choice: stick the Fusion Proshield right up into my nose like a crazy person, or grow the tiniest of moustaches just a hair or two thick right up under my nose, so close it's practically in my nose, that simply makes me LOOK like a crazy person (my emphasis).
Not that people who stick shaving razors up their noses are necessarily crazy. But they might be.
Anyway, I've opted for the beginnings of a tiny moustache. If I keep using these blades, and if they ever update the image of me they use in these pages, you'll get to see it one day.
The story of just how Gillette came to figure out that we men shave the same patch of skin over and over is how the Fusion Proshield came to be in the Digital Life Labs in the first place.
They've been handing out Bluetooth-enabled razors as part of a large-scale research project-cum-promotional exercise. The razors sync with your iPhone and tell you things about your shaving you never really knew before. Like when the average man shaves his face he uses 170 strokes of the blade – 120 of which are re-strokes over the same area, according to Gillette.
Presumably, the average man doesn't have demented, curly hair to throw out his shaving technique. When I shaved with Gillette's Bluetooth-enabled razor, I use around 450 strokes each time, with an average stroke time of around 220 milliseconds, and with at least 367 re-strokes.
Whether that makes my technique better than the average man, or worse, I simply don't know. I belong to the "slow shaving" school of shaving, where you use safety razors, or cutthroats, and you employ a technique that includes "blade buffing", where you make dozens and dozens of short strokes over the same area, as shown in my data.
Done correctly, blade buffing shouldn't clear the area of lather, and it shouldn't irritate the skin, meaning that a higher number of re-strokes recorded on your iPhone might not actually be a bad thing. It might actually be a good thing, even if you don't have lubricating strips BEFORE and AFTER the blades.
(If nothing else, the slow-shaving school is a lot cheaper than modern shaving: I can get a two-year supply of high-quality, double-edge blades for my safety razor for around $50, which is the same price you would pay for roughly two months' supply of the Gillette blades, depending of course on how quickly you blunt the blades and how much bluntness you're willing to live with.)
Like so many things in this new era of fitness and life trackers, it's hard to say what all the numbers mean. Some people think that many short strokes is better when it comes to shaving. Some people will swear that fewer, longer strokes make for a better and more advanced technique. A 220-millisecond stroke time could make me an expert, or it could make me a novice. Who knows?
But I do think that one day we will look back on this modern desire to quantify the unquantified and realise it was all just a little crazy.
Gillette Fusion Proshield
Likes Definitely less rash in one area than with my safety razors.
Dislikes Hard to get in under the nostrils. Very expensive compared with double-edged blades.
Price $22.49 for starter kit, $51.99 for pack of eight cartridges.
